On the morning of Friday, April 1, nine people—including children—in serious but stable condition were transferred from a hospital in Zaporizhzhia, in southeastern Ukraine, to major referral hospitals in Lviv on a dedicated two-car medical train that Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) developed together with the Ukrainian Railways.
The patients, all of whom were suffering from blast injuries, were accompanied by a team of nine MSF medical staff. This first train is just the beginning, with a larger and more highly medicalized referral train being developed by the MSF team.
Here, Dr. Joanne Liu, an experienced pediatrician in MSF’s Ukraine medical response team, describes her part of the process, evaluating the patients and making sure they were all stable for the journey.
On Tuesday, March 29, we went on a visit to Zaphorizhzhia and met the regional health director. We said we wanted to hear from him if there was anything he needed from us. He said he’d heard a story about a train for medical transfer, and he was very interested. He said he had patients who needed to be referred.
We said, “OK—let’s go and see your patients.”
Most of the patients we saw had been wounded in, or while trying to escape from, Mariupol. One patient had big open fractures, and both legs on vacuum drainage. Fairly stable, but a very sick child.
Of course, it makes sense to offload hospitals that are close to the front line to enable them to have more bed capacity. But we needed to make sure we’d be transferring the patients to somewhere where they will get the same level of care, if not a higher level of care. And we just wanted to make sure this would be safe for everybody.
We talked with the parents to ask if they wanted medical evacuation or not. The first mother said, “I want my child to be medevacced because I think it is the only chance for my child to keep his legs.” And the child looked at us and said, “I want to walk again.”
