![]() ![]() And despite widespread public anger at the nation’s corruption problem, which has provoked two revolutions in a decade, no one appears able or willing to do anything about it. ![]() They claim that the hospital, like government bodies all over Ukraine, appears to have been infected by corruption. But three surgeons working here, a former health minister, patients and anti-corruption activists all claim that this is not the whole story. It feels like a place where patients can come knowing that the goal is to get them well again. Old women dressed in green scrubs mop floors with disinfectant, giving the building a chemical tang that clings to your clothes long after you leave. In the corridors, patients sit on folding cinema-style seats talking on their phones, while their relatives try to catch the doctors’ attention. Nurses bustle around, bearing armfuls of folders. ![]() Surgeons in white coats discuss cases as they walk to the operating theatres. The Cancer Institute, though no more modern inside than out, feels reassuring. “Under the leadership of Professor Shchepotin, new approaches, conceptions and technology have been introduced, new principles for treating cancer patients, a significant proportion of whom have been returned to a fully active life,” the institute said in a summary of its work published in April. And he has been an effective one, according to the institute’s own assessment. In Britain, he would be known as the “cancer tsar” in Ukraine, he is called the “chief oncologist”. Shchepotin took charge of the Cancer Institute, which is both the country’s leading cancer hospital and its premier research institution, and was granted extensive powers to mend Ukraine’s health, including a budget independent of the health ministry, so that he could buy his own medicines and equipment. That year, President Viktor Yushchenko picked Shchepotin out as Ukraine’s champion in a new war on cancer. In 2008, Professor Igor Shchepotin, an experienced Ukrainian-born surgeon, predicted in a magazine interview that the number of new diagnoses of cancer would continue to rise from 165,000 annually to 200,000 by 2020. ![]()
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