Recorded evening of 31 March 2022 – Dr. Joanne Liu, MSF paediatric doctor working with the MSF Ukraine response team. Dr. Liu speaking from Dnipro in Ukraine.

We met with the [health] director of the region.
And he said: “What I’ve heard from you is apparently there’s a story about a train to do transfers. I’m very interested – I have 15 patients for you.
So basically, we just said: OK – let’s go and see your patients.
I think that we had in mind, like, some trauma patients, but stable trauma patients. These were ICU [Intensive Care Unit] patients.
And we were like – O.K. – this is not the business we thought…
Of course it’s the idea that - it makes sense to offload hospitals that are close to the frontline to give more bed capacity. But as well you need to make sure you’re transferring the patient to somewhere where they will get the same level of care, minimum, if not higher level of care would be the best. And we just want to make sure this is safe for everybody.
And then while we were talking, we had to negotiate with the parents if they wanted to be medevacced or not. And so the first mother is basically: “I want my child to be medevacced because I think it is the only chance for my child to keep his legs.” That’s what she had in mind. And the child looked at us and said: “I want to walk again”.
And then the director of the hospital is there, and the director of the ICU is there, and all the interns. And they were all saying: “You need to get them out of here. They need to survive. This is our hope”.
And I looked at the guys and said: “Listen, let me go home and discuss with my team. Let me figure out something.”
So what we did is we came back to base here. And we just said – OK, if the child is stable and his vital signs are stable, let’s just get him out.
And so we went back - the next day I went back with Dan and Natalia, and we basically screened every single patient. We went through it. This was basically our big thing - can you sustain a 20 hours transfer where we don’t have, actually, ICU [Intensive Care Unit] level of care? And can we ensure at least, at a very minimum, the same level of care, if not better?
We went back very early this morning - because the train was coming – to go back and reassess those patients, to make sure 100 percent that we thought they were stable.
And the level of dedication that people – it’s like, when we did the transfer [to the train] this morning, the ICU physician – not the interns, the senior boss of the ICU – came and did the transfer himself. He is the one who lifted the stretcher with the ambulance driver and with our staff. And he made sure the child was positioned the right way, made sure that his legs were fine, made sure the vacuum suckers for his wounds were working well. And he stayed for several minutes. And when he was finally satisfied, he looked at me and just said: “I think my job is finished now. I hand it over to you.”