Early October In 2022, Rachel Clark rushed to a Kiev air raid shelter with hundreds of Ukrainians. A UK-based National Health Service (NHS) doctor and author, he was in Ukraine to provide support and training to doctors caring for the dying in hospices across the country. But the visit to the capital came just as Russia was bombing the city’s power infrastructure with missiles.
Speaking at WIRED Health in London in March this year, Clark said, “Not only did I hear the missiles hit, but I felt them resound in my chest. On the ground, windows were blown out. Shattered. “I was terrified,” Clark says. “The Ukrainian people have endured this for months.”
Since the full-scale Russian invasion began in February 2022, life in Ukraine has been affected across the board, including the healthcare system. According to the charity Médecins Sans Frontières, hospitals were destroyed and damaged, medical facilities looted, and mines found inside functioning Ukrainian hospitals temporarily occupied by Russian forces. Those who were affected had limited access to essential medicines and treatments, the charity said.
Millions of people have fled eastern Ukraine during the civil war, and the ongoing fighting is further straining the country’s health infrastructure at all levels. A surgeon operating on a patient continue the process Clark says as the air raid sirens sound. Ambulances with people were dug out of the mud and snow after being stranded.
Amid widespread turmoil, the war has curtailed the care that can be provided to terminally ill people, including wounded soldiers on the front lines. , stating that more support is needed. One hospice she visited was her three-story building that accommodates up to 30 patients and could not afford to use the elevator, so those who could not walk down the stairs were trapped inside. . Similar scenes are repeated throughout the country’s hospices. A patient living with a terminal lung condition who couldn’t afford to donate to a hospice was knitting her socks for the doctors and nurses caring for her, Clark says.
Increasing supplies of morphine and pressure redistribution mattresses are two “low-tech interventions” that can help support people, she says. Clark and neurosurgeon Henry Marsh founded a new charity, Hospice Ukraine, to provide further training for staff and to fund further supplies. We will work with you to improve care. Its purpose is to help provide some relief to those coping with the deadly consequences of war. Clarke said when the charity was launched, “If you harm a doctor, you harm all the other people that doctor might have treated.”
