Perry World House hosted a virtual panel about Penn Medicine’s battlefield trauma care assistance four years after the Russia-Ukraine war began.
The Feb. 24 event, moderated by The New York Times reporter Gina Kolata, featured a conversation between Penn Medicine surgeons, United States military trauma leaders, and a Ukrainian health official. The speakers discussed their consultations on war-related cases — an initiative that began with virtual coaching and has continued through Penn Med and the Center for Global Health’s weekly contact with Ukrainian surgical teams.
Lawrence Scott Levin, chair emeritus of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, introduced the panel and explained that the symposium was part of a broader effort to share expertise with Ukrainian surgeons through Penn Medicine.
“Sponsoring Ukrainian surgeons here for training, we’ve been privileged and honored to care for war-injured warriors from Ukraine here at Penn Medicine,” Levin said.
Co-Director of Penn’s Orthoplastic Limb Salvage Center Steven Kovac discussed the “evolution” of Penn Med’s “mission in Ukraine” as a transition from virtual assistance to in-person surgical training courses.
“We recognized, and they recognized that there were some incremental needs and deficiencies in their training and expertise,” Kovac said. “Our skill set dovetailed very nicely with the injury patterns that we see on the battlefield in Ukraine, with a large percentage of injured service people being upper and lower extremity injuries requiring orthoplastic care.”
Chief of the Joint Trauma System at the Defense Health Agency Jennifer Gurney spoke on the panel and highlighted the “astronomically” challenging daily drone threats and delayed evacuation timelines in Ukraine, which have changed standard combat medical practices.
“The ways that they’ve adapted their trauma system and adapted their care and focused on battlefield survivability on a highly lethal battlefield has been remarkable,” she said, adding that there has been a greater focus on tourniquet conversion in prolonged-care settings.
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Chair of Orthopaedic Surgery at Penn Med Benjamin Kyle Potter explained that prolonged evacuation can mean patients arrive for definitive care long after injury, creating an “unsolved problem” for wound management, infection control, and reconstruction.
“By the time you’re getting the patients to a point of safe, definitive care, the injuries where the wounds are stored are in some cases, months old,” Potter added.
Kovac explained that Penn Med has been “working towards development of an orthoplastic center in central Ukraine” which could “centralize some of the care and also serve as a hub and a training model.”
After Kolata asked panelists to explain the motivation behind their work in Ukraine, Kovac expressed that many of the wounded patients, and even some medics, had civilian jobs shortly before the war — underscoring how “total war” reshapes an entire society.
“They were folks living their lives and enjoying their families, and out of a sense of internationalistic pride, wanting to defend their homeland,” Kovac said. “They defended their country and were injured, and obviously needed help.”
In an interview with The Daily Pennsylvanian, professor of Surgery at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania Jeremy Cannon explained that the organization for this event — titled “Penn on the Frontlines: Lessons from Trauma Care on the Ukraine Battlefront” — began in the summer of 2024.
“It was an opportunity to share what the Center for Global Health and Penn Med have been doing on the fourth anniversary since Russia invaded, the cost of war, the fact that it’s ongoing, and that we’ve done a lot to help support our Ukrainian colleagues,” he said.
Director of Programs at PWH Lauren Anderson told the DP that PWH saw the topic’s “policy relevance” and worked with Cannon to develop both a private workshop and a public event.
“We do these public events to raise awareness about policy issues that we think our intellectual community, our academic community, and the world, frankly, should be thinking about,” Anderson said.
