GMKA Advances Trauma Care in Ukraine with First Certified ATLS Course for Military Clinicians

The course brought together physicians who care for severely injured patients across different stages of trauma — from stabilization points and forward surgical teams to major military hospitals. For clinicians working in these high-pressure environments, ATLS provides a structured framework for making rapid, coordinated, life-saving decisions.

That shared clinical language has long been a cornerstone of trauma care in the United States, where ATLS is embedded within a broader, standardized trauma system. In Ukraine, such a system is still being built and strengthened — while clinicians are simultaneously responding to the extraordinary demands of war.

Expanding ATLS training can therefore serve two purposes at once: strengthening the tools available to military medical teams today while helping build greater consistency, coordination, and continuity across Ukraine’s trauma care system for the future.

“Until recently, Ukrainian physicians seeking certified ATLS training often had to travel abroad or rely on limited opportunities to take the course in Ukraine. Through GMKA’s collaboration with the ACS and Mass General Brigham, we can now deliver ATLS courses in Ukraine on a regular basis and train Ukrainian instructors who will bring this knowledge to clinicians across hospitals and regions,” says Nelya Melnitchouk, MD, MSc, FACS, Co-Founder and CEO of GMKA, board-certified colorectal surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and assistant professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School. “ATLS training helps Ukrainian clinicians save lives even more effectively during the war while laying the foundation for a modern trauma care system that will remain essential after the war ends.”

ATLS provides a systematic approach to the early management of an injured patient. At its core is the xABCDE primary assessment, which establishes a sequence for identifying the most immediate threats to life, prioritizing interventions, and organizing the work of the trauma team.

For Ukrainian military clinicians, this framework complements rather than replaces combat-specific protocols and experience. That distinction is especially important in the current war. 

“The conditions in which Ukrainian medical teams operate are constantly changing, and the injury patterns we see evolve from year to year. Today, this has increasingly become a drone war, and many of the casualties we treat are injured in drone attacks. The widespread use of FPV drones has also made casualty evacuation much more difficult. And then there is the issue of time: evacuation has become extremely challenging, and the ‘golden hour’ is often no longer achievable. A wounded patient may be evacuated after three hours, a day, a month, or even longer,” says a military anesthesiologist and one of the course participants.

A standardized framework cannot eliminate these challenges, but it can help teams maintain consistent priorities when the environment around them is unpredictable. It can also strengthen one of the most difficult aspects of trauma care: continuity across people, teams, and locations.

When physicians, nurses, military and civilian teams, and different hospitals use a shared clinical framework, they can communicate more clearly, transfer patients more effectively, and reduce the risk that critical steps are missed as a patient moves through the system.

For Dmytro, an anesthesiologist who works in a military hospital and deploys with forward surgical teams, that was one of the most important lessons of the course.

In the United States, ATLS operates within an established trauma system. Trauma centers work according to defined standards, clinicians receive standardized training, and data are systematically collected and analyzed to evaluate outcomes and improve care.

Ukraine is in a different position: a more integrated trauma care system is still being built and strengthened.  For the ATLS Course Director, seeing this process unfold in real time is itself remarkable.

This is particularly relevant in Ukraine because trauma care currently spans military and civilian systems, different institutions, and multiple stages of evacuation and treatment. The longer-term opportunity is therefore larger than training individual clinicians. It is about helping create greater consistency across the system itself.

The next phase is to build Ukrainian capacity to sustain and expand the program: growing a community of ATLS providers, developing a national instructor faculty, bringing standardized training to more hospitals and regions, and gradually transitioning toward Ukrainian leadership of the program.

“It is important that a shared approach is understood and applied not only by individual physicians, but by entire medical teams across different hospitals and regions,” says Kateryna Potapova, MD, MHA, PhD, Co-Executive Director of GMKA and Program Director for ATLS Implementation in Ukraine. “That is why implementing ATLS in Ukraine cannot be limited to a few courses for a small group of specialists. Our goal is to build a Ukrainian community of ATLS providers and instructors and create a system in which certified training can be delivered regularly under national leadership.”

Razom for Ukraine has supported the initiative as part of its broader work to strengthen healthcare capacity in Ukraine.

“Razom’s work is not only about responding to the challenges created by the war. We are also working to make Ukraine’s healthcare system stronger,” says Dan Solchanyk, Director of Razom Health at Razom for Ukraine. “The ATLS program is one of the best examples of that work. Physicians from across Ukraine, including frontline regions, gain critically important trauma care skills that they then apply in their hospitals and pass on to their colleagues. For us, this is an investment in Ukraine’s future.”

The urgency today is clear: Ukrainian military medical professionals are caring for an extraordinary burden of severe trauma and need tools that help teams make rapid, structured decisions under extreme conditions. But the value of building this capacity extends well beyond the war.

Severe trauma will remain a major challenge for emergency departments, trauma centers, and hospitals because of road traffic crashes, workplace injuries, disasters, and other causes. The long-term goal, therefore, is not to build a separate trauma framework for wartime Ukraine. It is to use the work being done now to strengthen trauma care across the country.

Shared algorithms, standardized training, stronger communication between institutions, and a Ukrainian instructor network can become part of the infrastructure that connects military and civilian medicine and supports better trauma care regardless of where or how a patient is injured.

“Right now, of course, our focus is on making sure the military is as well prepared as possible for the realities of this war,” ATLS Course Director says. “But the real positive outcome will be if, after the war, Ukraine continues implementing these systems and is able to significantly improve trauma care across the entire country — for patients of every age.”