Brooklyn doctors head to train medical professionals in Ukraine
NEW YORK - There's a set of skills that only decades in the emergency room can teach you. Dr. Joshua Schiller, Director of Social Emergency Medicine at Maimonides Health, will be leading a team of seven emergency physicians to Ukraine on Saturday to share life-saving skills to medical students and professionals in the war-torn country.
"One of the things that brought me into medicine was trying to figure out how to connect to the world in a way that makes it better," Schiller says.
A year and eight months since Russia's invasion, they're headed to the city of Uzhhorod, on the Western border with Slovakia, currently considered one of the safest regions of the country.
"Yes, the world's attention is on places like Ukraine and other conflicts. But when you go there, you realize how isolated the people who live there actually are," he tells CBS New York's Hannah Kliger.
Dr. Schiller first visited in April to see what the needs on the ground are. The work is part of a charitable organization he helped found called International Medical Response, which sends teams of doctors to countries like Rwanda and Haiti.
"Our interest started with our partnerships locally in Ukraine, where they were crying out for help for equipment and training regarding some of the constraints associated with the conflict," he says.
Most of the doctors are from Maimonides, and will be working with Uzhhorod's National University and Zonta International, a global organization that helps women and girls. Mariya Yurina is a Ukrainian volunteer working to build medical relationships with IMR.
"The medical students, they are delighted with this opportunity. They are looking forward to the medical professionals from New York," she says.
The doctors will be gone for a week, but Dr. Schiller says the goal of this partnership is to remain in touch with the team in Ukraine, to continue this training remotely.
"That's very important in terms of creating the kind of self-sufficiency that ultimately lessens their requirements for outside help," he says.
They're sharing one of the most valuable gifts in medicine: real world experience.
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