Help for Ukrainian refugees comes in many shapes in Poland. Right now, two young women are filling out dozens of forms for dental care for some of the 1,400 children that Happy Kids, a Polish charity, helped evacuate from care homes in Ukraine. The charity coordinated the evacuation with the Ukrainian government and collected frightened kids from the border.
Standards of care in Ukrainian institutions are so low that many of these children had never seen a dentist before. Of the 40 children evacuated to Łódź and housed in two ex-orphanages, every single one needed dental fillings – 258 cavities in total.
Before the war, Ukraine had the highest number of children (three-to 18-year-olds) in residential care institutions such as boarding schools and orphanages in Europe: more than 90,000. Nearly half of them have physical and/or mental disabilities, according to UNICEF Ukraine.
