We raised the issue of salaries at the protest. Mykhailo Radutskyi [head of the Ukrainian parliamentary committee on health] came out to us and promised a wage increase. “Everything will be fine, just wait a bit,” he said. But a year has passed, and my salary has grown by only 500 hryvnia [approximately $17], though they said that we should start receiving 800 dollars a month, like in other countries.
In February, we held a second protest – this time about the medical reform. About 200 people came out in Kyiv, and even more in Lviv. In 2018, the Suprun reform was launched [Ulyana Suprun was acting minister of health until August 2019]. Then the government changed, but the reform was never properly planned out. How is it going to end? It was planned to reduce the number of hospitals: at the moment, tuberculosis, epidemiological and psychiatric services are being destroyed.
Hospitals have become inaccessible to people living outside city centres. There are problems with delivering emergency patients: this hospital won’t accept them, that one is closed. We have suggested that the reform be reviewed with the help of the medical community. Unfortunately, we were not heard.
“In some hospitals, people who actively speak out about problems are bullied”
In the beginning, even people from the medical community treated us with distrust and suspicion. All sorts of rumours were circulating. People said that we had been set up with the help of some politician. People asked who pays me. It was painful. If you write the truth, fight for justice, then surely, it seems, someone pays for it? But over time – after we got to know each other, started meeting, they saw that we really are from the people and there’s no one “behind us”.
When the pandemic began, and patients started being placed in our hospital’s infectious diseases department, we were told that there were no masks. “Buy and sew them yourself,” we were told. I went live on Facebook and raised this issue. And our infectious disease specialist wrote that she had not been given a protective suit. People shared these posts, and thanks to this, volunteers began to help us. At the beginning of the pandemic, volunteers were providing 80% of our equipment.
Sometime after this broadcast on Facebook, I had a phone call from the police. They said that I had received a letter from the Security Service of Ukraine [SBU]. The director of the hospital had complained that I was “spreading false information”. I explained everything to the policeman, one person to another. He laughed and that was the end of it.