TNMU Launched the “Improving Health Care at the Service of People” Project

Ternopil National Medical University has launched implementation of the “Improving health care at the service of people” project of the Ministry of Health of Ukraine with the support of the World Bank. Two more universities participate in the implementation of this program, in particular, O. Bohomolets National Medical University and Bukovyna State Medical University.

Thanks to the training project, 720 medical specialists will be trained, 300 of whom will acquire and master practical skills at TNMU Centre for Medical Simulation. In total, training for this number of doctors will last for eight weeks. Each group will complete a full cycle of training for 6 days. The first two days, the participants will practice their skills in the course “Management of a critical adult patient. Advanced resuscitation measures in adults”, the next two days – “Management of the critical paediatric patient. Advanced resuscitation measures in paediatrics”, one and a half days are allocated to “Management of a critical patient with trauma” and another half day is allocated to the course “Peculiarities of the work of a health care facility in conditions of mass influx of victims”. Of the 300 people who will study at TNMU, there will be 120 doctors and 180 nurses from emergency departments. Specialists from 11 regions, including Sumy, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, Kherson, Dnipro, Mykolaiiv, Odesa, Ternopil, Lviv, Volyn and others, will come to TNMU. Regions will delegate a multidisciplinary team, which will include specialists from 30 cluster and supracluster level hospitals. 10 people will be represented from each hospital – 4 doctors and 6 nurses. Each group will have 35-40 participants.

During the official opening of the program, which took place on January 15, 2024 at the Centre for Medical Simulation of Ternopil Medical University, TNMU Rector Mykhaylo Korda noted that “today, the Ministry of Health pays a lot of attention to the development of the emergency medical care system. Our university has become the centre of training and retraining of personnel of this service in Ukraine, as all the conditions have been created here at a high level”.

The Director of the Health Care Department of Ternopil Regional Military Administration, Olha Yarmolenko, added that she has no doubt that the instructors of TNMU will teach the participants of the program everything necessary. She expressed her hope that all acquired knowledge and skills will be applied in medical institutions of Ternopil region and the level of medical assistance in reception departments will increase many times. According to her, the state has equipped these departments with everything necessary, so today it is important to improve teamwork, work out the coherence of actions and polish practical skills in order to save the patient’s life as much as possible. Olha Yarmolenko expressed her confidence that representatives of other regions, which are participants in the project, will also significantly strengthen their medical facilities.

The Head of the Department of Emergency and Simulation Medicine, Arsen Hudyma, emphasized that since 2019, TNMU has been a participant in projects and programs for training and improving the skills of emergency medical service workers. An important aspect of this project is that doctors and nurses of emergency departments of medical institutions will study together as a single effective team.

The Director of TNMU Centre for Medical Simulation, Halyna Tsymbaliuk, drew attention to the fact that this project is a logical continuation of all previous projects, which are implemented to support the reform and improvement of the qualifications of emergency medical care specialists. “Four years ago, we started training ambulance workers, who are the pre-hospital unit, and the hospital unit is the emergency department in hospitals. Today, we are training specialists of these units,” Halyna Tsymbaliuk added.

An instructor group of experienced specialists is involved in the training, in particular, most of them are teachers of our university. They also additionally invited pre-hospital care instructors who at one time completed training, different workshops, courses and successfully passed exams at the Centre for Medical Simulation of Ternopil Medical University. Antonina Chervatiuk, Yurii Denysiuk, Nargiz Dzhavadova, Olha Dutchak, Emilia Burbela, Alina Pokryshko, Roman Huk were included in the teaching team from TNMU. Among the invited mentors are Olena Volovyk, a consultant of the European Office of the WHO, and Liudmyla Pavlenko, an instructor of the European and All-Ukrainian Resuscitation Council from Vinnytsia, Olena Hrushetska and Viktoria Vynarska, instructors of the training departments of the emergency medical care centres of the Volyn region, and Bohdan Fostiak, Oleksandr Cheredaryk of the Rivne region. Colleagues from Kyiv Emergency Medical Centre will also be there in the coming weeks.

TNMU Press Secretary, Yanina Chaikivska.

Photographs by the author.