Kingston Health Sciences Centre (KHSC) is one of six hospital organizations in southern Ontario teaming up to provide medical supplies to healthcare teams in Ukraine.
KHSC issued a news release on Tuesday saying that a truckload of supplies had left Kingston on the weekend, headed first for Ottawa and then by air to Warsaw, Poland.
Alongside KHSC, the donation was made by Brockville General Hospital, Lennox and Addington County General Hospital, Perth and Smiths Falls District Hospital, Quinte Health Care and Providence Care.
In the release, KHSC’s Program Medical Director of Internal Medicine Dr. Stephen Archer, whose spouse Dr. Kathie Doliszny is a first generation Ukrainian Canadian, said the material contribution was towards “a fight for peace, freedom and democracy.”
“I am proud that KHSC and our hospital partners in this region have, through this act, put themselves on the right side of history,” said Dr. Archer.
The donation includes defibrillators, ventilator supplies, surgical masks and laceration kits among other things.
The release continues that this coordinated effort has been led by two former Queen’s University trainees, Dr. Nicolas Berbenetz and Dr. Tetyana Rogalska.
The Ukrainian-Canadian doctors are working with the Canada-Ukraine Foundation to ship materials from Ontario to Ukraine.
Dr. Rogalska said they were grateful for the support they received for such an urgent cause.
“As Ukrainian Canadians, we recognized that the war was becoming a crisis affecting millions of people and we wanted to use our knowledge and resources to support our medical colleagues in Ukraine who continue to bravely defend life,” Dr. Rogalska said.
“Personally, reaching out to medical professionals in Ukraine, we learned of their enormous challenges and urgent needs, and started to connect with our Ottawa- and Kingston-area hospitals to see how we could help.”
A spokesperson for KHSC said while they don’t currently have an estimated total value of the donation, it is easily in the tens of thousands of dollars, adding that while no future donations are planned they will keep in contact about future needs.
The donation in total was over eight full shipping pallets worth of supplies from the combined organizations.
