They were called Camo Scrubs, Medical Jedi, Angels in Scrubs… The last one is probably the most accurate characteristic since they come to help people not for material values or glory, and neither in search of adventures, but only to the call of their hearts. They come to where they are needed most. They heal wounds and diseases – on both bodies and souls. And they heal the country – stitch up its huge wound the war has made.
Since late 2014, nearly half a thousand medics, paramedics and auxiliary personnel, some time or other, have participated in the Pirogov First Volunteer Mobile Hospital. Taking into account that most of them worked on the monthly rotation basis in far-from-comfortable frontline conditions, they could be called “500 medical Spartans” as well. The PFVMH volunteers are people of various occupations, but all of them are top-notch professionals. They include professors and scientists with doctoral and Ph.D. degrees; head physicians and department heads of hospitals; a Deputy Health Minister and the Health Ministry’s chief ophthalmologist; the head of the National Medical Chamber of Ukraine and the chief cardiovascular surgeon with the Presidential State Management of Affairs. There are even a rock musician, a bartender, a Belarusian psychiatrist from New York and a fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine.
Our angels “fly” eastward from various corners of Ukraine. They represent its 25 regions, including the oblasts of Vinnytsya, Volyn, Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Zhytomyr, Zakarpattya, Zaporizhya, Ivano-Frankivsk, Kyiv, Kirovohrad, Luhansk, Lviv, Mykolaiv, Odesa, Poltava, Rivne, Sumy, Ternopil, Kharkiv, Kherson, Khmelnytsky, Cherkasy, Chernivtsi and Chernihiv as well as the city of Kyiv – a total of 175 cities, towns and villages.
Click on the PFVMH shield on the map to see statistics for the respective region (as of Aug. 1, 2019):