The entourage walked slowly through Northwestern Memorial Hospital’s blood bank, winding past lab technicians, centrifuges and refrigerators holding blood samples.
Every few steps, the three people at the heart of the visit — blood bank and blood system leaders from Ukraine — paused to ask questions through a translator.
They had traveled more than 5,000 miles, during a war, to see how Northwestern and other Illinois hospitals and blood centers operate, in hopes of improving blood services in Ukraine. The country had already begun work to reform its blood system before the start of the war, a crisis that made the job more important than ever.
