(From November 2002 Year End mailing to all UGoL benefactors and volunteers)

Dear Friend of UGOL:

...60 surgeries are scheduled to be performed by the end of 2002 at Lviv Cardiac Surgery Center, which is five more than last year. To date, all of the surgeries have been successful. And so, we are grateful for the success of our efforts under Stephanie Andre, the Director of Operation CHILD CARDIO Care UA (OpCCCareUA) to promote sponsoring surgeries to be performed in Ukraine. We advanced to more complex surgeries, promoting consultation among hospitals in Ukraine to identify the most effective and least risky surgical course in a number of cases. Our goal is to increase the number of surgeries performed in 2003 both in quantity and complexity. To that end, we will endeavor to coordinate the formation of a US surgical team to travel to Ukraine and perform surgeries together with their Ukrainian counterparts. There are many talented and knowledgeable physicians in Ukraine who are lacking the experience in case management and the skill sets derived from a high volume of cases.

For this reason, we established a program called OpCOT in conjunction with Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia to provide the opportunity for two months of observational training at ChoP. The parishioners of St. Vladimir’s Ukrainian Orthodox Church and their Pastor Fr. Frank Estocin generously provided housing and subsistence for the first candidate, Dr. Lyubomyr Solovey and pledged their continued support. Before returning to Ukraine, Dr. Solovey reported at a meeting of the Ukrainian Medical Association of North America that the information and skills he obtained were invaluable. As part of our program, Dr. Solovey will impart the experience he gained to other anesthesiologists in Ukraine, further expanding the knowledge base. We are already making plans for our next candidate, Dr. Olha Kuryliak, a cardiologist.

Through the generosity of a multitude of benefactors, the UGOL program OpCURES shipped useable medical supplies to Ukraine and continue to work on advancing real time diagnostic information sharing via the internet.

Through the UGoL program OpCCCare US, the number of surgeries in America declined to only 7 during the past year. That means many of the complex cases in the geographical area within which we have a sphere of influence in Ukraine have been corrected over the past few years and that we must now intensify our outreach throughout Ukraine. We continue to seek to develop relationships with additional hospitals. Surgeries were performed at Christ Hospital in Chicago and St. Joseph’s Hospital in Paterson, NJ. Montefiore Hospital in Bronx, NY continues to generously provide their expert cardiac, surgical and post-operative care to provide our children with the gift of life. Because of the generosity of Rotary District #7490 in obtaining a grant from the International Foundation, we expect that the number of children’s lives saved in America in 2003 will double.