Surgeons and anaesthetic surgeons from regions all over Ukraine gathered in Lviv, in late March and early April, for two HEST® courses delivered by our foundation.

 

Against the backdrop of continued trauma for the country, as Russian attacks intensify, our focus was to deliver our bespoke Hostile Environment Surgical Training courses: HEST A™ and HEST®, and to identify and train potential instructors – localising the teaching and the skills for the long-term future.

 

Faculty lead for anaesthesia, Ian Nesbitt, who trained in our HEST A™ course, said: “Every time we come and deliver training, we identify people who we think have potential to be instructors and to be Ukrainian faculty members. They’re incredibly impressive people. They have enthusiastically come back again and again, and we have trained them in some teaching techniques, and we’ve taught them with the exact skills that they use on this course, and they are now basically starting to run the courses themselves.”

 

Our foundation has been training surgeons in Ukraine since the war began over 3 years ago. In late March, 33 participants and 14 Instructor Potential candidates gather for the 5 day course. Uliana Kaschii a doctor and anaesthetist, originally from Mariupol is one of the Instructor Potential candidates. She was working in the frontline when she first heard about our HEST courses in 2014 and is now leading many of the trainings herself.

 

I came to do this course as an IP, and the last couple of months I felt a little burn out from the medicine, because I was really tired, I’ve been coping with a lot of stress, and I didn’t feel a lot of motivation from my environment, and the first day I came here I got this motivation for medicine again – yesterday I agreed to go to the front line again.

 

“From participating as an Instructor Potential, I like to see how the knowledge is spread, how we improve the anaesthetics field in Ukraine. In general I see the people who want to improve medicine and develop anaesthesia, and improve the care of the patient, and I love to see that in this course and see that we are moving somewhere in medicine.”

 

Our second course, HEST® for surgeons in early April, trained 39 participants and 5 Instructor Potential candidates.

 

Yaroslav Kulachek, a Ukrainian frontline surgeon and IP told us one of the most difficult things is working under fire, under missile strikes. “You have to perform the triage and you have choose who will live and who will die, because we don’t have the capacity. One of the most difficult is when you deal with children, and a lot of casualties who come to you and you see they’re not ill but it’s a war – when one human being tries to hurt or kill another human being. It’s most striking for a person to understand how horrible a war can be and what scars and consequences will be left after this.

 

I want for this course to share my knowledge with surgeons, and to help them improve their skills for the battlefield area and for those who need the surgical help, and any other kind of help for soldiers, civilians, children, no matter where they will work and with whom they will deal.”

 

Ian Nesbitt reflects:

 

We come, we teach, we go, we leave echoes behind us. And those echoes, I think, will grow and grow. They’re like a stone being thrown into a pond. The ripples will keep going. And that, I think, is one of the very exciting things that ultimately, these ripples will keep going by themselves without us being here.

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