Managing Private Practice in a War Zone

Abstract

Eighteen days of the full-scale Russian invasion into Ukraine gave us urgently a need to rethink the ways we can run private dental and oral surgery practice. Wartime dictate us completely different and sometimes highly risky agenda. For the need to provide emergency dental care and oral surgery to those residents of the city/village who cannot or do not want to be evacuated from the regions of hostilities, some private practices continue to work. Although they are not providing a full range of services, they are highly efficient even carrying out emergency care, e.g. 16 private practices in Kyiv during the first 13 days of Russian-Ukraine war of February-March 2022. Among problematic sides of managing private clinic in war zones are: (1) supply chain disruption (Williams, 2013) of the dental and oral surgery materials, (2) interruption in work of dental technicians or complete cessation of their activities due to the evacuation or absence of materials, (3) termination of work of diagnostic centers that are important for diagnosis establishment and for control of treatment results, (4) difficulties (increased price for taxi and risks for life) for patients and staff members on transfer to the clinic, (5) significant decrease of clinic`s personnel members due to the possible evacuation, (6) decrease of the number of performed procedures due to the paragraphs 1, 2, 3, and 5, (7) the need to go down to the bomb shelters in case of air alarm, forcing the interruption of treatment procedure, (8) injury of the staff members, (9) significant decrease of amount of financial resources due to the paragraphs 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, etc.