Ihor Vitenko is an Ukrainian who’s living in Belgium for more than 20 years, and is one of the few officially recognized wound care specialist in Belgium, practicing at the Jan Palfijn Gent Hospital.
In 2014, Ihor Vitenko was already helping the victims of Euromaiden. He went then there for a month to work in the military hospital of Kiev saving many victims.
When the war started on February 24th 2022, he decided that he must go again, and from early on in the war, he went immediately to Vinnytsia, a city located at 200 kilometers from Kiev. That’s how the organisation Mission Ihor Vitenko got created.
In the Vinnytsia hospital he mostly operated in the most deplorable conditions, sometimes without anesthesia, several hundreds of wounded soldiers, reducing drastically the rate of amputations through negative therapy wound care technics, unknown in Ukraine.
He also trained numerous doctors and nurses to these new techniques, to make sure that they could also contribute on their own and spread these techniques throughout Ukraine.
Once he was back in Belgium he founded a training program with Jan Palfijn Hospital in Ghent. Every 2 weeks, 2-4 nurses from Ukraine were coming to Belgium to get trained on wound care and contribute to the diffusion of these technics.
Ihor Vitenko’s mission keeps going on while the war is still continuing. His mission won’t end when the war stops, there will be many other things to work on. His biggest mission is elevating the medical sector in Ukraine to a minimum European level.
Achievements of Ihor Vitenko
