On December 24, 2019, at the Kovel Territorial Medical Association (MTMO) hospital, a team of doctors of the Heart Institute, led by the director of the Institute, Professor Boris Todurov, successfully completed a heart transplant to a recipient with marked dilated cardiomyopathy. This surgery became the first in Ukraine in the last 15 years to have a heart transplant.

Professor Todurov's team includes:

Head of Organ and Tissue Transplantation Department Cardiac Surgeons Gavrilo Kovtun;

the head of the intensive care unit Igor Kuzmich;

Alexander Druzhin, Head of the Circulatory and Extracorporeal Treatment Unit;

head of the anesthesiology department Mykola Goncharenko;

cardiac surgeon Anton Shpachuk;

resuscitation doctor Yevhen Boyarchuk;

the operative sister is Natalia Kopelchuk.

The next day, Professor Todurov noted, "Our heart transplant has generated great resonance and interest. The patient is in order, we are bringing him to the Heart Institute. We will continue treatment and rehabilitation in Kiev. Thank you to the whole team for their coordinated work."

A heart donor was a patient with severe open brain injury, in which local specialists reported brain death. The relatives consented to the operation to remove the organs of the deceased for transplantation and thus saved the health and life of three patients at once, because the doctors of Kovelsky MTMO simultaneously performed another donor kidney transplantation in another operating room, and the second kidney was referred to Kiiva rescue another patient.