The fact that Västra Götaland received so few patients is due, among other things, to the region not responding quickly enough when it received the question, according to Per Albertsson, medical decision-maker within the region’s Ukraine organization.
— When we started with this, if I’m being self-critical, we weren’t fast enough on the ball. When we answered which patients we could take, they were almost always turned away, he tells the newspaper.
The EU’s civil protection mechanism ERCC, which coordinates disaster preparedness, was activated around a month after Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine began. Since then, patients from the country have been distributed to different countries in the EU.