For one month now, we have been on site in Ukraine with a four-wheel drive ambulance and are transporting patients. At the request of the World Health Organization (WHO), CADUS is now coordinating all international medical evacuations from Ukraine.

Coordination center for international medical evacuations

The CADUS team in Lviv, our base in Western Ukraine, is not only transporting patients through Ukraine. At the same time, CADUS is working on the establishment of the coordination center, which will coordinate a total of 20 ambulances of international aid organizations. This will allow Ukrainian patients to be distributed from war-torn areas to hospitals within Europe, where they will undergo urgent specialized treatment.
Our coordination center will work with both internationally experienced organizations and the many smaller Ukrainian initiatives that have already been working to evacuate people from contested areas since the outbreak of the war and are doing great work here. “We are working hard to connect all actors* as best as we can to provide effective, rapid assistance to the affected people,” said Sebastian, Team Lead of Ukraine Mission.

The four-wheel ambulance in action in Ukraine. Photo: CADUS

Patient transports in Ukraine

With our four-wheel ambulance we were able to provide real additional value and help patients in need last month. After a transport from Chernihiv, on the Belarusian-Ukrainian border, to Lviv, our medics reported: “Such injured people need our four-wheel intensive care ambulance. You can’t transport them with a normal ambulance.”

It was supposed to be a twelve-hour drive for the team – in the end, the trip took around 22 hours. The further east they got, the more they had to contend with destroyed roads and demolished bridges. The patient, who had to be evacuated from Chernihiv for special treatment, was finally delivered safely and successfully to the good care structure in Lviv.

A patient transport through Kyjiv. Photo: CADUS

Especially the hospitals in Ukraine have impressed our medics so far: “What the hospital staff in Chernihiv has done is really unbelievable” says Simon, an emergency paramedic. “The clinic only worked with emergency power, and there were cable drums everywhere. There were only three doctors left in the whole hospital, but all the patients were in a condition that was unbelievably good for these catastrophic conditions.”

Due to the high demand, we have already brought another ambulance to Ukraine and work a lot with various organizations. Always with the aim of giving critically ill patients the best possible chance of survival.