The first palliative care course in the Ukraine was held in Kiev in May 1996, with the support of the principal doctor, Anatoliy Voronin and Pastor Philip Barnett of the Church of God of Prophecy. The course was led by Virginia Gumley (hospice/palliative care director of an NGO promoting health care in the former Soviet Union) and Dr Stephen Dyer (of Milton Keynes, UK). They found poverty levels much worse than they had anticipated and a medical system where dying patients are sent home to die with minimal assistance from the district oncologist and nurse. Support of the Red Cross and the local church helped to establish palliative care beds in the Dniprovsky Regional Hospital12.
One respondent wrote:
'Ukraine has [just] started the palliative medicine development thus there are no more than five or six hospices in the country, The first hospice was opened in Lviv in 1997, our hospice [Irano-Frankirsk] is second …The Ukrainian hospice service is developed by enthusiastic individual people'13.
A particular issue concerns the effects of the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986. One effect has been the increasing incidence of thyroid cancer in children. As one respondent noted: 'Many organizations still provide some medical and social aid to victims of Chernobyl. But none of these projects currently support a hospice program for children with life threatening illnesses as has been done in Byelorus'14; there is however a children's hospice, begun in 1999, in Kiev.
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