Saving those Born Before Their Time
A story how Dr. Ronald Hoekstra, a neonatologist from Minnesota, transformed healthcare for prematurely born babies in Ukraine and inspired birth of our Foundation
In 2006 Ron Hoekstra with assistance of Rosty Semikov launched “International collaboration to save Ukrainian children’s lives” at Kyiv City Hospital #1. It was a short-term training program (observership) in the U.S. for Ukrainian medical professionals. Mykhailo Saluita, Igor Chermak and Iryna Berdnykova were leaders and first participants from Ukrainian side. The newspaper “Darnytsa Today” (2011) article in the link.
In the next 9 years the program miraculously grew up and spread nationally to cover top 7 medical centers in Ukraine. About 50 Ukrainians were trained in Minnesota. Ron also attended those hospitals with workshops, delivered life-saving medicines, and lectured at the Ukrainian national conferences (2015).
As Dr. Hoekstra later shared in his memories “God at Work”, he saw a profound impact on the way little kids were treated a decade later in a whole 40-million people country:
“What we found was more than we could have ever imagined. Survival of infants as young as 26-28 weeks at birth was no longer the exception, but the rule. The doctors and nurses were functioning as collegial teams which had a respect for and a dependance on each other that we would never have dreamed possible.”
Video interview with Dr. Hoekstra “Foundations” (2024) UPD
