Tough treatment: Doctors in war-torn Ukraine

Being a doctor in rebel-occupied Donetsk is challenging work, especially as Kiev authorities have cut off funding for doctors. RT’s Jean Flight meets the medical staff that are treating the victims of bullets and cluster bombs.

 

Roman, 23, is a militiaman. He wanders restlessly up and down the hospital corridor. Sometimes he stops by a ward door. He is wearing a uniform with a hood covering his eyes and a bandage strapping his chin. He holds a silver cross in his hand. Injured by a bomb fragment, he can barely speak: the doctors screwed a metal plate into his bottom jaw, and he still has a lot of surgery to go.

 

Alexey, a surgeon, believes his patient is one lucky man. If the fragment had hit him in the head, Roman would have been killed. Instead, once the doctors fix his wounds and replace his missing teeth with dental implants, he will be free to go and recover at home. 

 

[…] Igor Bugorkov, the head of the regional dental center and an oral surgeon himself, shows me a room that suffered a direct hit on August 7. The window frame has been since filled with bricks – they won’t buy a new frame anyway. All they can to do is wait for one as part of humanitarian aid. 

 

“The shelling started at 10 am. We were lucky that the first two mines didn’t reach the hospital, and we had the time to evacuate the patients and the personnel. So only two people died,” says the chief doctor. 

 

The postmortem unit lost 25 windows. Another mine landed in the yard of the 18th hospital and the explosion shattered every window in the institution although it doesn’t look that way. The 21st hospital is located near the airport and is currently under fire but continues to operate. 

 

He showed me the basement where during the fierce fighting they set up bunk beds for patients among the engineering systems, with doctors on duty around the clock. 

 

The last time staff were paid was in August. 

The full article continues at: http://rt.com/news/205999-ukraine-donetsk-doctors-treatment/