Dr. Nataliia Tetruieva is one of Ukraine’s leading maxillofacial surgeons, responsible for the surgery team in the National Children’s Specialized Hospital OHMATDIT, to provide free cleft lip and palate treatment to children from every region of the country, even in the midst of a devastating war. The past months have presented Dr. Tetruieva and her team with unprecedented risks in the operating theater, effectively putting their lives on the line to perform surgeries. Given the complexity of the three-four hour procedure for cleft lip and palate, the team is compelled to continue their work through evacuation sirens and power outages, while relying on hospital generators. Because of the destruction of infrastructure, Dr. Tetruieva’s team also compensates for the loss of operating facilities in other cleft centers in Dnipr, Kharkiv and Odessa.

“The siren goes off four times on some days, but you learn to live with it. We cannot afford a delay in treatment. It could cause feeding distortions, delays in speech development, or even affect the child’s facial development. We just have to accept the risks,” says Dr. Tetruieva.

From the outset of the conflict in 2022, she and her team immediately shifted to providing emergency care for the wounded. As a self-declared patriot, Dr. Tetruieva is proud of the role she has played treating civilians. Many of her female colleagues including nurses, doctors and paramedics have joined the army to defend Ukraine. Despite the setbacks of the war and the reliance on international organizations to provide funding for depleted patients and programs, there have been positive outcomes as a result of the international cooperation with Ukraine. “Everyone is convinced that the war is going to be won. This will mean that our society will change and potentially we’ll become an EU member. The opportunity to work across multidisciplinary teams and with other countries could mean that we modernize our surgical techniques and become a center of excellence for other hospitals around Ukraine.”

Dr. Tetruieva’s tenure spans 30 years in line with Ukraine’s independence. When she became a surgeon after medical school, Ukraine was still emerging from Soviet culture, and opportunities for women were rare, particularly in the male-dominated field of surgery. But change came with the possibility of international exchange and new opportunities as Ukraine gained access to the international community. Dr. Tetruieva has personal experience of those opportunities, having trained in cleft surgery in Germany after she completed her surgical training post medical school. “It was the first-ever training program for children’s doctors that Germany offered. The condition was to learn the language in a short time. I accepted that challenge and learned not only surgical and other treatment techniques, but also the logistics and structure of a comprehensive cleft center.”