Child’s heart surgery performed by headlamp as Russia turns off power

The doctors were midway through the operation when the lights went out. “It was a few days ago, when they were doing a caesarian section,” recalls Oleksandr Kachur, head of Kyiv’s perinatal centre. “For about 15 minutes they had to work with torchlight, before the generator kicked in.” Similar conditions recently befell surgeons operating on a child’s heart in Ukraine’s capital, according to a video posted last week.

“Rejoice, Russians, a child is on the table and during an operation the lights have gone completely off,” Dr Boris Todurov said in the clip, as surgeons used headlamps and a torch at Kyiv Heart Institute.

Vladimir Putin’s missile and drone onslaught against Ukraine’s national grid has left millions with patchy electricity and long blackouts. The barrages and outages have added to the strain on a health service that had already been stretched by two years of severe Covid-19 infection, mismanagement and corruption.

Attacks have not only knocked out power, but nine months of war has destroyed hospitals and clinics themselves. There have been more than 700 attacks on health facilities, the United Nations estimates. As fighting has raged, staff have had to leave their homes and abandon their jobs, undermining services.

Dr Hans Kluge, Europe director for the World Health Organisation (WHO), has warned that Ukraine’s health system “is facing its darkest days in the war so far”.

Yet health officials around the country also said that despite the challenges, good planning and early preparations had meant that they had been able to keep working, so far.

“Our hospitals are working, but of course the situation is intense,” said Igor Terekhov, mayor of the eastern city of Kharkiv.

The industrial city in the east of the country saw heavy conflict for several months at the start of the war and neither the city’s hospitals, nor its health service bureaucracy were spared. Yuri Soroklat, health care director of Kharkiv’s city council, had an office on the fourth floor of a city council building which was hit by a Russian cruise missile.

The blast was so strong that he later found debris from a car inside his destroyed office.

While he was spared, the attack destroyed all the databases, computers and records that he used to oversee the city’s 66 working hospitals and clinics. One ambulance depot and four health facilities were destroyed in the early fighting and are still knocked out, taking out around 10 per cent of the city’s hospital beds. Nine more facilities were damaged and are currently being repaired.

“For now we are helping everyone who needs help,” he said. “It’s harder than before the invasion, but now we are able to do it and we have all the medical supplies, thanks to volunteers.

“Of course we are worried about everything. We are worried about the heating systems, about all the supplies, about the fridges for medicine, but we have a plan.”

He said the early fighting had demonstrated to him that the Kharkiv health system would need to prepare early for the winter.

“In spring, we already understood that we had to be prepared for winter. It’s war and you don’t know what will happen,” he said. Staffing has been one headache. In the early months of the war, when the Russian forces were on the outskirts of Kharkiv, his 14,000-strong workforce dipped to 7,000 as people fled.

“Half left the city to save their lives,” he said. Many have returned after a Ukrainian counter-offensive evicted the Russians in September, with employee numbers currently at about 11,000. Power is his biggest worry, as it is for health departments around the country. The city has amassed 55 generators, many as a result of foreign aid, but he estimates they need another 80. The question of how to get more generators and prevent hospital blackouts also haunts the mayor.

“How can we do surgery, how can the emergency department work without electricity?” said Mr Terekhov.

“There should be very, very high capacity generators so that hospitals can have an electricity supply.”

Surgery was not necessarily the biggest problem he said. Operations could be timed to when there was power.

“But after surgery how can people recover if there is no electricity? This is the question. How will all the other medical equipment work?

“It’s a big problem.”

‘We are worried about everything – about the heating systems, about all the supplies, about the fridges for medicine’