BURBANK : Hospital Sponsors Conference in Kiev

The history as well as the science are what draw Dr. Joseph Turcillo and a small Burbank hospital to Kiev.

“I thought even though we’re a small hospital, we could get out of this provincial mind-set,” said Turcillo, medical director for education at Thompson Memorial Medical Center. “And in this day of competition, it behooves a hospital to learn as much as it can to survive.”

The hospital is sponsoring from Sept. 4 to 14 the first American-Ukrainian medical conference in Kiev. Thompson Memorial doctors will conduct seminars on drug therapy treatments with Ukrainian doctors from the Kiev Research Institute of Cardiovascular Surgery.

The Burbank hospital is a small 100-bed facility but used connections with the Ukrainian community in the Valley to set up the conference.

Burbank doctors will be able to trade knowledge with one of the best medical facilities in the world. But for Turcillo, the added advantage will be to experience the changes in the former Soviet republic.

“I’ve always been interested in the Soviet Union,” Turcillo said. “It should be especially interesting now to find out for myself what’s happening there. You don’t know anything unless you go and find out for yourself.”

Turcillo said the Kiev institute performs 60,000 open-heart surgeries a year.

The conference is to be filmed by a Hermosa Beach crew that will release the tape as a weekly series for cable television, showing the personal side of the conference as the doctors from both sides meet.

One lesson the American doctors may find useful with all the Clinton Administration talk of health care reform is how to run a hospital efficiently on a minimal budget. But Turcillo said he was also looking forward to other insights into how to use medical technology.

“I would like to know how they handle their patients with some of the drugs they have,” Turcillo said.

This is the first international conference the Burbank hospital has attempted. Thompson Memorial, originally Burbank Community Hospital, is the oldest hospital in the Valley.