Before medical goods arrive at the hospitals, two needs assessments take place. The first needs assessment is submitted to Aid Pioneers and serves to determine the containers’ contents. Once the containers arrive in Lviv (Ukraine), our local partners check in with the hospitals again to receive an updated needs list. The 40ft container is unpacked in Lviv and its contents distributed to the different hospitals accordingly.

Our local partners have a list of hospitals that receive the most wounded from the war. These are hospitals that have the largest bed capacity and are in or in proximity of combat regions. These are hospitals that our partners have been working with previously and have established trusted relationships with.

Like Aid Pioneers, Project C.U.R.E. is an NGO and provides the containers at an at-cost basis. Most of the medical items have been donated, wherefore the handling fee that Aid Pioneers pays to Project C.U.R.E. covers the labour and storage cost that Project C.U.R.E. incurs.

We have decided to focus on stabilisation of patients in the first 5 days for two reasons. The first is medical: it is the most important window of care to stabilize patients. The second is logistical. Ukraine has a logistics issue in terms of transportation of the wounded. Those wounded can not be transported to secure hospitals with larger bed capacities which lie outside of combat zones before having been stabilized.

The full process of shipping one container takes roughly ten weeks, as it includes the full project cycle of needs assessment, packing list completion and container packing (3 weeks), transport U.S.A. - Germany (4 weeks), transport Germany via Austria to Lviv (3 weeks), Lviv to the front (2 weeks).