Poland and Ukraine plan to create joint military medical hub, - Polish General Gelerak
The Ministry of Defense of Poland is considering a project to create a military medical hub, where the experience of Ukrainian doctors using Polish technologies will be analyzed.
The director of the Military Medical Institute in Warsaw, General Grzegorz Gelerak, said this in a comment to Ukrinform, Censor.NET reports.
As Gelerak emphasized, the decision to create a large-scale hub in the military-medical sphere between both countries was made during a meeting of representatives of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and Poland, in particular, heads of medical units in both armies, which took place in May this year in Kyiv. He noted that the schedule and cooperation plan was determined then.
He noted that this cooperation, on the one hand, will be based on obtaining and analyzing information on the nature, type, and scale of sanitary losses that occurred during the war in Ukraine.
"On the other hand, we will provide access to our knowledge and capabilities, which we have thanks to the implementation of a number of research projects concerning, for example, autonomous platforms for the evacuation of the wounded, methods and methods of treating various types of wounds on the battlefield, in particular, burns. We are ready to cooperate so that on the basis of Ukrainian and Polish experience and opportunities in the perspective of the next 3-5 years, we will together create a large hub of the military medical service," Gelerak noted.
According to him, the implementation of this project from the Polish side is at the stage of consideration by the Ministry of National Defense of Poland.
"We expect that in the next few weeks we will move to the implementation phase of this plan," stated Gelerak.
He said that Poland is ready to provide medical assistance to Ukraine in several dimensions.
"First of all, we want to treat wounded Ukrainian military personnel, especially in the fields of medicine, which are currently difficult for Ukraine. For example, maxillofacial surgery is a significant challenge for you today. In parallel with the treatment of Ukrainian military personnel, we want to train your personnel so that you were becoming autonomous in this sphere", - Gelerak.
He emphasized that based on the study of the experience of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) of Polish soldiers who were in Iraq and Afghanistan, the knowledge of Polish doctors in the field of combating PTSD is at the highest level. Therefore, Polish doctors have been sharing their experience in this field with Ukrainian doctors since 2014 and are ready to do so in the future. Gelerak noted that since 2014, about 10 groups of Ukrainian doctors have received training at the Military Medical Institute in Warsaw on the issue of countering PTSD. In addition, trainings with the participation of Polish specialists also took place in Ukraine, in particular in Rivne.
Gelerak noted that for the Polish side, the medical side of the experience in the context of the war in Ukraine became a "Copernican revolution" (radical change of views. - Ed.) and prompted serious changes.
"For us, knowledge from the war in Ukraine is like a Copernican revolution. We are radically changing our approach to what medical care should look like during hostilities," Gelerak emphasized.
In particular, he specified that the issue of at what stage and what type of medical care should be provided to wounded soldiers needs to be deeply reconsidered.
"These are no longer systems aimed not at evacuating the wounded for many hours, but at providing aid near the front line, guaranteeing qualified medical care as soon as possible. For us, this is a completely new experience, in particular, how to prepare medical aid points, taking into account the Ukrainian experience, which these points are often the targets of attacks from Russia," Gelerak stated.
He added that Warsaw is aware that in the event of potential aggression, Poland could also face this, and therefore, using the Ukrainian experience, Poland wants to make changes to its doctrine.
