Air ambulance charity taught emergency medicine in Ukraine

On 26 June, GWAAC’s Critical Care Doctors James Tooley, Ed Valentine and Andrew Heavyside, along with Specialist Paramedics in Critical Care (SPCC) Pete Reeve, Callum Sutton and Matt Robinson, set off on a 25-hour journey to Kyiv.

The volunteers went to Kyiv with the intention of teaching a tactical medicine course to prepare civilians to respond to trauma incidents as and when needed during the conflict. They delivered training over two days and returned to the UK on 1 July.

On arrival in Kyiv, the group responded to local needs and demands and taught around 60 people selected for the course. These were mostly office workers such as diplomats and ambassadors at an increased risk of a missile strike on their place of work. Some also travel between towns and cities as part of their role and are at an increased risk of landmines and ambush.

The training was delivered through translators which slowed the pace a little but Reeve said ‘it was pretty straightforward’.

The training covered themes such as how to stop bleeding, using a tourniquet, giving CPR and the triage process. Reeve said that ‘triage is important – if their building is hit by a missile, they need to be able to identify which injuries are most severe, so they know who to treat first’.

As well as providing training in lifesaving tactical medicine, the volunteers also left supplies of tourniquets, dressings, and bandages for the trainees. Specialist paediatric equipment was gifted to an intensive care unit in Kyiv and two fully equipped response bags, dressings and iGels were given to frontline hospitals, taken by the security firm that looked after the volunteers while in Ukraine.