The third All-Ukrainian Winter Championship of Emergency Medical Teams was held in Kremenets for three days.

According to Arsen Hudyma, professor, and head of the Department of Disaster Medicine and Military Medicine of the Ternopil State Medical University named after I. Gorbachevsky, such competitions were initiated by Lviv medics as summer competitions within the framework of the grant. In 2008, Ternopil doctors adopted this idea and held the first summer championship.

- There has been seven summer All-Ukrainian ambulance championships with international participation. At the same time, the idea of holding winter championships arose, because there is a need to help both in winter and summer. In 2016, the summer championship was held in the Carpathians and twice the winter championships were held in Kremenets and we hope that this tradition will continue.

This year 31 teams from eighteen regions of Ukraine, private clinics, and four universities competed for the title of the best. Seven foreign teams from Poland, Israel, and Lithuania also took part in the championship. The level of competition, the organizers say, is growing every year.

According to the head of the state institution "Territorial Medical Association of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine in Ternopil region" Mykhailo Vasylyshyn, the main purpose of the competition is to demonstrate the interaction, performance of all assigned functions and tasks of both police officers and emergency medical services.

- Officers of the National Police and special forces of the "Kord" are involved in several stages of this championship. It is the interaction, coherence, clarity, and implementation of the standards approved in our country that is worked out at such competitions. In one of the stages, which takes place in the area of the toboggan run, the traffic police ensure compliance with traffic rules.

For three days, the participants of the Kremenets Medical Rally proved their skills not only in the professional field but also in the ability to cooperate. Employees of the national police, emergency medical care, and fire and rescue service worked out the methods and specifics of joint work.

- These are three arms of one big body, the purpose of which is to save human life. We have the most diverse challenges. Therefore, the first question a medic asks is whether the place is safe. Because if there is a threat, both police officers and representatives of the State Emergency Service arrive at the scene, and they must work in harmony.

A small child poured boiling water on himself - the ambulance crew received such a report. Upon the arrival of paramedics, the drunk father, grabbing a gun, wounded the mother in the leg. All this is one of the fictional stories at the championship, which should demonstrate and teach doctors and police officers to work properly.

- Our teams are very brave, they go to rescue the mother despite the danger, - says Vitaliy Kryliuk, Head of the Training Department of the State Institution of Disaster Medicine of Kyiv, - This is a mistake because they can become victims of a tactical medical emergency. Foreign teams reacted beautifully, found a safe place, hid, and earned maximum points.

For the first time, a team of sixth-year students of the Dnipropetrovsk Medical Academy got to the championship of this level. They did their best to demonstrate professionalism and coordination in their work. Highly professional teachers of the university prepared them for the competition.

- Here our employees, who came, can work out both practical and theoretical qualities, to be in artificially created man-made situations, mechanical injuries of patients of varying severity and feel like quality workers and check how much they are ready to provide assistance in different conditions, save their lives and save the lives of others, - said Yuriy Patsyurko, judge of the competition.

The victory in the "Kremenets Medical Rally-2018″ among the teams of emergency medical care and disaster medicine centers was won by the residents of Khmelnytskyi. The best of the best among the universities were the students of Vinnytsia Medical University, and the team of paramedics №1 Krakow (Republic of Poland) won first place among foreign colleagues.