Our teams continue to respond to the war in Ukraine. We currently have approximately 20 international and 350 Ukrainian staff working in response to the war across the country. They work as medical staff (surgeons, doctors, nurses); psychologists; logisticians and administrators. Here is how we are responding:

Medical evacuations: Our teams evacuate patients from hospitals close to the frontlines, including trauma patients, and refer them to hospitals in safer areas through a fleet of 17 ambulances operating across eastern Ukraine. Some of the ambulances are equipped for intensive care support. Run by a team of paramedics, doctors, and drivers, the ambulances have referred over 18,500 patients since 2023.

Emergency services: In Kherson city, an MSF medical team supports surgical and trauma activities. Medical teams run triage and operating theatre activities and perform surgeries. Our staff also provide treatment during mass casualty events and perform surgeries, in the emergency room at Pokrovsk hospital. A medical team also supports Kostiantynivka hospital in Donetsk and the Izium hospital in Kharkiv based on need.

Support to hospitals: We send donations of medical supplies and hygiene kits to medical facilities, and provide training support for emergency responses, managing a high influx of war wounded, decontamination, trauma, gender-based violence and mental health. Donations from MSF have also been used to restore hospitals damaged by shelling in Donetsk, Kherson, and Dnipropetrovsk regions.

Mobile clinics: MSF mobile clinics provide basic healthcare services, psychological counselling and social services, sexual and reproductive health services, mental healthcare and health promotion. Through these mobile clinics, we also provide medicines for people with chronic illnesses such as hypertension, asthma, diabetes, heart disease and epilepsy. Severely unwell patients are referred to hospitals. Through our mobile clinics in the Kherson and Mykolaiv regions, we are now screening for tuberculosis.

Mental health: Our teams provide mental health support through mobile clinics in areas where it’s hard for patients to access healthcare, particularly in rural areas and shelters for people displaced by the war. In 2023, a dedicated centre for people experiencing war-related post-traumatic stress disorder was opened in Vinnytsia. There, we offer psychological sessions for patients and people in their support network. Our specialists provide them with techniques to help reduce and prevent worsening of symptoms, increase coping skills, improve interpersonal functionality, and decrease the consequences of traumatic stress.

Physiotherapy: MSF teams are supporting seriously injured post-surgery patients with specialised physiotherapy and post-operative care in Cherkasy region in order to aid in their longer term recovery.  

In addition to providing emergency treatment, our teams developed rehabilitation projects, including care for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and physiotherapy, to cater to patients’ longer-term needs.

In 2023, we used specially designed medical trains to evacuate patients from frontline areas to safer places where they could receive the specialised 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 per cent 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 specialised psychotherapeutic services for people experiencing PTSD symptoms at a new centre in Vinnytsia region. In a shelter run by local organisations 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 healthcare, emergency surgery and treatment for chronic conditions, in Kharkiv, Dnipro, Mykolaiv, Kherson and Donetsk regions, where many 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.