Ukraine

MSF provides a range of services in Ukraine, including:

• Medical referrals and evacuation by MSF ambulances.  
• Supporting emergency care, intensive care units, and surgical capacity at hospitals near the front lines in the Dnipropetrovsk and Kherson regions.  
• Early Rehabilitation activities taking a multi-disciplinary approach including physiotherapy, nursing, post-surgery care, and psychological support for war-wounded and injured patients.
• Physiotherapy and psychological support trainings for staff in surgery wards at MSF-supported hospitals.
• Mobile clinics providing primary health care, mental health counseling, psychoeducation services, and sexual and reproductive health care, particularly in areas close to the front lines.
• Active case finding and screenings for tuberculosis (TB), HIV, and hepatitis for high-risk groups in areas close to front lines.  
• Medical donations, including medical kits, equipment, and medicine—to hospitals and medical facilities facing shortages.
• Training on secondary health care, including on mass casualty response, pain management, and mental health for health care staff. 
• Comprehensive mental health care for war-related post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among displaced people, children, and veterans.  

In 2023, we used specially designed medical trains to evacuate thousands of patients from frontline areas to safer places where they could receive the specialized care they needed. At the end of the year, this service wound down due to a shift in needs, while our ambulance service scaled up to focus on emergency care. Of the many thousands of patients we referred, almost 60 percent were treated for violent trauma.

Our teams supported the emergency department and surgical and intensive care units at Kostiantynivka and Selydove hospitals in Donetsk region until the end of 2023, when the frequency and proximity of shelling became too dangerous to safely maintain a continuous staff presence. However, we established and managed to maintain a constant presence in a hospital in Kherson city, supporting trauma and surgical care.

Mental health support remained a crucial component of our response. In September, we started providing specialized psychotherapeutic services for people experiencing PTSD symptoms at a new center in the Vinnytsia region. In a shelter run by local organizations in Zernove, Kharkiv region, we offered psychological care to people who had moved from Russia and Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine.

MSF also ran early rehabilitation projects for war-wounded people in Cherkasy, Zhytomyr, Kyiv, Sumy, and Vinnytsia regions, implementing a multidisciplinary approach comprising physiotherapy, psychological support, and nursing care.

We continued to run mobile clinics delivering a range of services, including basic health care, emergency surgery, and treatment for chronic conditions in Kharkiv, Dnipro, Mykolaiv, Kherson, and Donetsk regions, where many of our patients were elderly people. Throughout the year, we donated medicines and medical supplies to dozens of health facilities and conducted training for health professionals and first responders.