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International Conference on the Development of Volunteer Civil Relief Service in Ukraine Was Held at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy

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Published on Wednesday, 20 June 2018 13:57

The Conference was organized by The Malteser Relief Service in Ukraine and The Malteser Medical Service in Poland in cooperation with Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.

The list of special guests included

• Jan Piekło – Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador of Poland in Ukraine

• Antonio Gazzanti Pugliese di Cotrone – Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador of The Order of Malta in Ukraine

• Uliana Suprun – Vice Minister of Healthcare of Ukraine

The Conference gathered dozens of people from all over Ukraine who came to discuss the problem of civil relief service in the state, to share their experience and to learn from the international participants. The event also had a practical part – one of the inner courts of the Academy was turned into a space for practical learning with a lot of specially equipped tents where the experienced volunteers in the sphere of civil relief from Ukraine, Poland, Italy and Germany gave master-classes.

This problem is very relevant for the Ukrainian society today, since our state is in the process of reforming the sphere of medical care and the civil relief services is one of the prioritized elements of these reforms. Such services are functioning in Kyiv, Ivano-Frankivs’k, L’viv, Mariupol’, Zaporizhzhia and a number of other Ukrainian cities and towns. They prove to be rather effective and to have a good coordination with local police, medical services and fire services, but still there are some major obstacles in their work: there is no official statutes and regulations for such organizations on the level of state and no standards common for all local devisions; many of them suffer the lack of equipment and the lack of well-prepared specialists; there are many cases of misunderstanding between different types of services on the local level.

This Conference is concentrated on the problem of volunteering in the sphere of civil relief and healthcare. The organizers, who have a great experience in the field and operate the statistics picked all over EU, pay great attention to the preparation of volunteers, for it proved to be a very effective practice – the civil relief volunteers are extremely helpful on the initial stages of any kind of emergency situation if they are trained and equipped well.

Kyiv-Mohyla Academy has already been active in such volunteering – our Center of Psychological Health and Psycho-Social Support is working in Kyiv and two cities on the front line – Pokrovs’k and Slovians’k – where our experts train civil service volunteers, teachers, psychologists, social and medical workers for the front-line zone.

Photos from the Conference can be found here.

Report by Olesia Dalebiha, Kyiv-Mohyla Strategic Development Center