First Lady of Ukraine Olena Zelenska took part in the seminar "Partnership for Transformation: Shaping the Future of Healthcare in Ukraine" for medical institutions that are members of the international medical partnership program or will join it in the near future.
The event was also attended by Minister of Health Viktor Liashko and WHO Representative in Ukraine Dr. Jarno Habicht.
The International Medical Partnership Initiative was launched during the Third Summit of First Ladies and Gentlemen in Kyiv on September 6, 2023. It envisages direct cooperation between Ukrainian clinics and foreign medical institutions.
"Ukrainian hospitals are overloaded, as they are saving both victims of Russian attacks and other patients. From the very beginning of the invasion, we were grateful for any manifestation of medical cooperation with the world. At the beginning of the war, it was manifested in the evacuation of our severe patients – we did this in cooperation with the world's first ladies – and in the arrival of foreign medical teams to Ukraine. The drawback was that not all patients could go abroad, and not all the world's best doctors could come here. We needed a system that would work continuously. That's how the idea of international medical partnerships came about, when a Ukrainian hospital cooperates with a specific foreign hospital. In fact, a twinning is being established between medical institutions, and they are already cooperating directly, depending on a specific need, on each unique situation," the President's wife said.
So far, 27 memoranda of partnership have been signed. The initiative involves 21 Ukrainian medical institutions from 10 regions: Vinnytsia, Dnipropetrovsk, Zakarpattia, Ivano-Frankivsk, Kyiv, Lviv, Mykolaiv, Odesa, Rivne, Ternopil, and Kyiv city. The project is implemented by the Ministry of Health of Ukraine under the patronage of the First Lady.
Effective partnerships between healthcare facilities help improve the quality of healthcare. The WHO has its own model for developing such partnerships – Twinning Partnerships for Improvement (TPI), which is based on setting priorities that are consistent with national health policies, plans and strategies.
"No medical system is able to effectively counteract large-scale challenges on its own. This was demonstrated first by the COVID-19 pandemic and then by the full-scale war. International medical partnership is about deepening international cooperation at the hospital-to-hospital level, i.e. at the level of needs and profile of a particular medical institution. It is about establishing direct links between doctors and sharing best practices to improve the quality of medicine both in Ukraine and in other countries," said Health Minister Viktor Liashko.
"Medical partnership is a bilateral process. Ukraine also has something to give and share. Our experience in treating polytrauma and in extreme medicine is now the largest in the world. Our doctors, including surgeons, cope with extremely difficult tasks of saving lives every day. This is something we can and should share. For Ukraine, partnerships are a chance to save more lives. We have very powerful and dedicated doctors and other medical staff. And this is our opportunity to help them not to burn out, to preserve themselves and to work better," Olena Zelenska emphasized.
Representatives of medical institutions who took part in the event had the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the WHO approach to twinning partnerships. During the group work, the participants tried to jointly work out the principles of twinning partnerships that could be the basis for an international medical partnership program in Ukraine and identify potential priority areas for such cooperation.
It is anticipated that the World Health Organization will provide the necessary support in the future to help each medical institution develop a strategic vision for the partnership, as well as offer recommendations to the heads of Ukrainian hospitals on how to effectively organize work with international partners.
Olena Zelenska also thanked everyone who is currently saving lives in Ukraine.
It bears reminding that recently, Okhmatdyt and Kryvyi Rih City Clinical Hospital No. 2 signed memoranda of international medical partnership with the Karolinska University Hospital (Sweden).