It’s difficult to call an ambulance and no place to store insulin in Crimea

The health care institutions faced difficulties in their work following the electricity cuts in Crimea.

This is stated in the monitoring review of the human rights situation in Crimea for November, prepared by the Crimean Human Rights Group.

The human rights activists point out that the work of the city major hospitals is provided by the generators. The generators in Simferopol, Kerch, Feodosia, Sevastopol, Yevpatoria, and Yalta, were used to provide work of intensive care and surgical units while other departments worked, depending on the unstable electricity.

The Cancer Center of Simferopol lacked generators for the work of all departments and only emergency units were supplied. The hospital of Sudak was not equipped with generators and was fully dependent on the schedule of power cuts. A fire occurred in one of the Feodosia hospitals due to improper connection of a generator. Part of equipment was destroyed.

The pharmacies, which did not have generators, had problems with storage of the drugs that must be kept in fridges, such as insulin. The medicines were transferred to other pharmacies where there were conditions for storage. But doctors prescribed drugs for a specific pharmacy, and after they had been transferred they could be stored only, not sold.

The power cuts also jeopardized the life of patients who were connected to special medical devices, such as artificial lung ventilation apparatus or incubator for newborns.

The human rights activists said that 11-year-old Ivan Plotnikov from Sevastopol, who suffered from Werdnig-Hoffmann spinal muscular atrophy, almost could not breathe on his own and was connected to ventilation apparatus at home. His mother said that the generator battery worked for seven hours at most. A few days after the electricity was cut off in Crimea, the Emergency Situations Ministry employees delivered additional generator.

It was difficult to call an ambulance because of the problems with mobile communication, and people often delivered patients by themselves. When the doctors were called to apartments, they had to carry out examinations and give injections by the light of a flashlight or a candle.

As a reminder, the Crimean Human Rights Group in January reported that the methadone, banned in Russia, had not been used for therapy in Crimea so every tenth drug addict, who had undergone that therapy, died.