History

The first mention about “station of emergency health services” may be referred to 1918 when the manor (now buildings №2 and 4 on Nikitin street) of merchants-old rituals Faleevs was confiscated and handed over to the community of Red Cross. There medical health center, city hospital, outpatient department for children and dermatovenerologic dispensary were opened. At the same time emergency health services were organized here and the center was created at the city hospital of Red Cross. As N. K. Bordugova, one of the first who got medical education in Kaluga at courses for nurses, remembers that the first emergency aid was delivered on cabbers. We do not know about the activity of this service at that time any more. Difficult economic situation in the country at the beginning of 1921 impacted life conditions of Kaluga natives as well as their health. Governorate health department held activities for improvement of provision of medical services to citizens – free home health care by means of institute of regional doctors, night duties of doctors, free drug procurement were entered. Besides that the work of the Center of emergency health services is organized in Kaluga from the 1st of October 1922 as a department of emergency health services at the Red Cross hospital №1. The city wasn’t provided with transport. Governorate health department had only 22 horses and no car. That’s why the first emergency medical aid was delivered on cabbers. The years of the Great Patriotic War interrupted peaceful life in the whole country as well as in Kaluga. A considerable part of medical and preventive care institutions were destroyed. Almost the whole Public Health Service had to be recovered over again. As military doctor E. K. Smirnova remembers: 25 years on after the establishment in 1947 the center of emergency health services was a part of the clinic at the first city hospital on 3, Nikitin street and was situated in a single room with a telephone. Hospital Head Doctor Y. G. Zlotnikov was the Head Doctor of emergency station at the same time. The regular staff comprised a stableman and the horse Mongol, a doctor, a medical assistant, a nurse. In the daytime the attending physician Anna Nikolaevna Barysheva with 40 years length of experience was on duty, calls (from 5 to 10 in a shift) were treated by medical assistants, and for night duties part-time doctors from city hospital were invited. Military hardiness, habit to work on the road and in extreme conditions lead Ekaterina Semenovna Smirnova already in January 1947 to the regional clinic where she replaced A. N. Barysheva. Medical staff consisted mostly of doctors who were ex-servicemen. That is how the main skeleton staff of the city center of emergency health services formed consisting of brotherhood of doctors who had got through the war: E. K. Smirnova, Z. A. Balina, M. I. Solovyova, O. M. Fedorova, T. S. Dodonina, nurses M. I. Kuznetsova and M. M. Lytkina and the driver- front line officer V. I. Preobrazhenskii.