Clinical postdoctoral fellow shares experience volunteering in Ukraine and other conflict zones

March 30, 2022 — Riley Jones, M.D., heard a woman weeping aloud as the bus carrying Ukrainian refugees crossed the border into the safety of Poland.

Her family had been shot at by Russian forces, and her husband had stayed behind to continue fighting in war-torn Ukraine. The bus that drove her and her fellow passengers to safety needed to take a different route to Poland than the one it had taken to pick up the refugees, since the previous path had been bombed the night before.

“The woman was crying out of happiness for being safe, sadness for leaving her husband and uncertainty about what will happen next,” said Jones, an adjunct clinical postdoctoral global health fellow in the UF College of Medicine’s division of hospital medicine, who recently traveled to Ukraine to provide humanitarian assistance during its war with Russia. “Her crying was a realization of leaving Ukraine and a chapter of their lives coming to an end. The family left with only one extra pair each of donated clothes.”

Jones, a volunteer with the humanitarian and health nongovernmental organization MedGlobal, traveled to Ukraine for about a week in mid-March with eight other volunteers and a war crimes investigator. Since 2010, when he first journeyed abroad to provide humanitarian assistance in Haiti following its devastating earthquake, Jones has traveled across the globe to assist the wounded and help shocked health systems adapt.

Every conflict zone requires different health needs, Jones said. When he was stationed in Colombia for two months just prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, he worked directly in patient care as part of a stable, long-term project that was gradually being handed over to Colombian colleagues.

In Ukraine, his team’s role was to assess the needs of the health system and meet with the Ministry of Healthcare in the city of Lviv. Jones’ specialty was to help medical workers understand how to best use limited supplies and create treatment protocols tailored to the new situation. MedGlobal trained more than 250 Ukrainian health care workers, who tuned in on Zoom to learn more about treatment methods and give insight into chemical weapons.

“Physicians are trained on how to deal with these injuries, but not at this scale,” Jones said. “Nobody takes a course in medical school called, ‘how to be a doctor in a combat zone.’”

Even when people living in combat zones are not at immediate risk of danger, there are massive disruptions to basic health systems, he said, including limited access to everyday medications.

“For example, someone with diabetes who doesn’t have their normal medication might find it difficult to avoid carbs if they are in a refugee camp where rice and beans are being served,” Jones said. “A lot of times, you need to come up with creative solutions to these problems, which often involves increasing personal resiliency.”

Jones said it’s important to be aware of your surroundings when giving humanitarian aid in conflict zones. In Colombia, he stayed in touch with local business owners, including grocers, hairdressers and taxi drivers, to find out times when it wasn’t safe to be outside. In Ukraine, he knew the threat of a bombing meant hunkering down with his team in a bunker beneath the Ministry of Healthcare building.

“More than 50 of us were piled into a room built for 20, and the doors were two or three inches thick of solid steel,” he said.

MedGlobal managed to send about $500,000 worth of urban combat supplies to the cities of Kherson, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Vinnytsia and Zaporizhzhya as part of the mid-March deployment. Jones returned with the group March 30 to provide further aid.

“This stuff is nerve-wracking,” he said. “It’s intolerable to watch people undergo these hardships when there’s something you can do about it.”