No country can withstand the impact of such a rapid and massive migration without stress. Of first importance, is the need to work towards creating a system that could be resistant to all kinds of crises, that is operationally flexible, that can adapt to changing needs, and that is realistically financed and well managed. After all, we need to care for all those who have escaped the war, into Poland, and who are likely to remain in our country for some time. Both individual and groups of medical practitioners, as well as NGOs, must be able to meet the refugees’ health care needs in a more organised way than we did with Paulina and her family. Part of this is to develop a nationwide register of refugees who receive assistance, to know what kinds of skills and resources they need.

This problem does not only concern Poland. For years, researchers have emphasized the need for a coordinated global research agenda on migration and health. An efficient system would be to collect meaningful data on an ongoing basis, whose identification, customisation, and searchability would become crucial in enabling national and transnational health care systems to adapt and respond [10]. Much has been said about this as early as February 2017, during the 2nd Global Consultation on Migration and Health in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and in the months following those discussions. A global center of knowledge on migration and health is urgently needed, and the crisis we are currently witnessing in Poland is a prime example of this need. The beneficial uses of such a database would include the archiving of the rich experiences of various medical communities – in our instance the experiences gained by Polish medical professionals.

Secondly, there is no doubt that the visit of Ukrainian doctors to Poland may be extremely valuable in increasing the provision of medical care. Apart from the obvious reasons, such as the experience of Ukrainian medics, the primary reasons are practical – namely, the dramatic shortage of doctors and nurses in Poland. The government simplified the regulations to allow overseas medics to work in their fields in Poland, including from Ukraine; and more than 800 Ukrainian doctors have already recently applied to work in Poland [11]. So, what is the problem? Local governments complain that the approval process is overly bureaucratic, especially regarding the issuing of work permits by local medical chambers [12]. A solution is to automatically recognise the certified qualifications of medics from Ukraine, which is postulated in many circles [13]. To include these doctors and other medics in the Polish system, it is important to note that medical education in Ukraine differs significantly from the Poland system in many respects, including that Ukrainian specialization is for one to two years (compared with four to six in Poland), and that relatively few Ukrainian medics speak Polish, and vice versa. Nevertheless, granting official permission to work should not take the number of weeks it currently does, because this creates an unnecessary blockage in the path towards improving a system in crisis.

A related problem is the language barrier facing patients. Clerical obstacles often arise from a misunderstanding or lack of appropriate translation. Some refugees only have documentation in Ukrainian. Ukrainian medics can help solve the problem of language, but they also need the support of translators. Overall, language barriers are one of the main factors limiting refugees’ access to healthcare [14].

The third matter, and this is no less important than other needs during wartime, is that we must take care of ourselves and of our own society, because only then will we be able to help our guests from Ukraine. This sentiment can be seen in the article “Historical perspectives on xenotransplantation” by Schlich and Lutters in which the authors discuss how the history of medicine, and its socio-political contexts, touch human lives [15]. When we consider that the procedure of xenotransplantation has encountered a series of social obstacles that the authors call a form of “cultural rejection”, we can see there are likely to be parallels in the present social domain, between host and refugee. We are convinced that long-term assistance to refugees in Poland must begin with the Poles themselves. We cannot allow prejudices, a badly organized health care system, or an unfair distribution of financial resources to ruin the very community that we want to share and co-develop with our Ukrainian guests.

In Poland, there is a very long tradition of rapid “mass movements”, but that history is also full of the failures of such movements, many of them uprisings, not only because of external forces. Given this history, and the present context, medical practitioners must not forget about themselves. Long periods of providing voluntary help are exhausting both physically and mentally. The enormity of suffering and the prospect of failing to help everyone who needs help can lead to a feeling of hopelessness and burnout. That is why it is important to foster solidarity within the medical community, and tenderness, expressed as concern for others and the consciousness of a shared fate. As the Polish Nobel laureate (2018) Olga Tokarczuk once said: “Tenderness is the most modest form of love. […] Tenderness is spontaneous and disinterested; it goes far beyond empathetic fellow feeling. Instead, it is the conscious, though perhaps slightly melancholy, common sharing of fate” [16].