Around 20 Ukrainian children with burn scars will be operated on by Polish and American specialists in a hospital in eastern Poland next month.

Details of the project were announced at a press conference on Wednesday, and the operations will take place from May 15 to 19 in Łęczna.

Some of the injuries were caused by the war while others were the result of domestic accidents. A number of the children being operated on suffer from congenital defects.

The youngest patient is just three years old.

Doctors from Boston General Hospital and the University of Michigan together with specialists from the East Centre for Burn Treatment and Reconstructive Surgery in Łęczna as well as a team from the Department of Reconstructive Plastic Surgery and Microsurgery of the Medical University of Lublin will perform the operations.

The director of the Łęczna hospital, Krzysztof Bojarski, said that cooperation with Boston General began in April last year, after the war started, with a joint initiative to transport severely burned children from Ukraine to Boston after a short stay in Łęczna.

Gennadiy Fuzaylov from the Boston hospital, said: “We are very excited about this cooperation. We hope that it will be long-term and we will be able to carry out such procedures and exchange experiences many times.”

Fuzaylov added that after the operations some of the children currently in Poland would remain under the care of the centre in Łęczna, whereas patients from eastern Ukraine would return for treatment and rehabilitation to a hospital in Dnipro and children from western Ukraine would be under the care of a hospital in Lviv.

Deputy coordinating physician of the East Centre of Burn Treatment and Reconstructive Surgery in Łęczna Tomasz Korzeniowski said that the methods of treating burn scars would include skin grafts