In spite of the war, the fruit of multinational collaboration International Family Medicine Clinic, “INTERFAMILY” was opened on 23 September 2022 in Uzhhorod, Western Ukraine. And even after recent massive Russia’s attacks it continues its activities.
This clinic serves two important missions. The clinic is providing (1) high quality and full spectrum care for entire families, mostly IDP, and (2) it is an excellent facility for medical education for student doctors and residents aimed at becoming family doctors.
Now we may sum up the results of the Clinic’s first days of its existence.
First of all, due to the Clinic’s closeness to their settlements a number of patients visiting the Clinic during the first days of the work has exceeded our expectations. And this is even without our extra and special advertising of the Clinic because we are not ready for the full scale activity yet.
From the other side, we may witness the growing number of doctors and residents wishing to work and to study at our Clinic. The possibility of obtaining practical knowledge working with the patients attracts residents and medical students even from other faculties of Uzhhorod University.
We have managed to sort out and to put in order all the medicine we have. Now everything that a doctor needs is at his arm’s length.
As we have prepared almost all required documents for the Clinic Licensing, we need to staff it.
In order to organize the work of the Clinic we have introduced a flexible work schedule for all the members of the staff the same as the system of appointments for the patients. Besides, we appointed the heads of the doctors, residents, pharmacy, nurses, and supply manager divisions.
We have signed a Collaboration Memorandum with “Doctors without Borders” which will:
– give us extra hours of work by this increasing it to 8 hours a day, even including Saturday;
– give us a Psychologist for free consultations;
– provide free medicine and vaccination
We have increased a number of specialist doctors in accordance with the Clinic’s requirements. Now plus to our other specialist doctors we have part time dermatologist, ENT (Otolaryngologist) and pulmonologist, all of them work at request terms.
New specialist doctors require new instruments. Thus, an ENT specialist will get his audiometer presented to us by Dr. Rampton (US) for audio testing. We are planning to buy a coagulator for our dermatologist to remove warts, papilloma, etc. that may be profitable for our Clinic.
In order to increase the flow of patients, together with the city hospital we organized a laboratory based on our Clinic for free general and biochemical blood test. The laboratory will function 3 – times a week.
We go on with the Project “EUSIT” (supporting Ukrainian GPs and GP trainees in their online training) tailored not a long time ago together with EURACT. Young doctors, residents and medical students have weekly trainings on the basis of the Faculty.
To ensure the required workload of the Clinic, we also implement the EUSIT-PEP project developed by us. Apart from “training the trainees” we launched the on- and off-line patient education. To our surprise we have got the order from the Local Council for 8 hours training for the displaced people from Eastern and Southern part of Ukraine. The free training will be carried out by our young doctors and will include the rules of treating seriously ill patients (dehydration, bedsores, etc.).
The residents will take part in the work of the laboratory: they will regulate the stream of the patients or participate in analysis decipherment and by this getting their own professional niche.
In order to rotate our young doctors and residents we began to implement in our practice the American and European hands-on- practicing and hands-on -teaching system. Such a doctor-assistant system first, increases a number of the residents even from other clinics involved in the process and, secondly, gives them a real chance to test themselves in practical work. We follow “the three pair eyes” rule ( a doctor, a resident, a student) while treating one patient in order not to make a performance out of the process and not to embarrass a person. As soon as a student gains experience he becomes an assistant. An assistant gets his scholarship while a student gets free education.
The process of creating a website came to its final stage. The site will have its educational direction too. The members of the staff write short information for the patients (burns, ticks, mushrooms, etc.) The sources are mostly American websites that they translate into Ukrainian and compress.
We have prepared several new projects including MEDICAL EXCHANGE PROJECT (MEP): EXCHANGE OF EXPERIENCED AND EARLY CAREER FAMILY DOCTORS WHO PROVIDE MEDICAL HELP TO THE REFUGEES. Unfortunately, neither of the donors accepted it yet. But we are expecting several international experts to come and to work at our Clinic in the coming months.
This is how the INTERFAMILY Clinic takes its first steps.
