Many years of life and work of the famous Russian surgeon Nikolai Vasilievich Sklifosovsky have been closely related to Poltava. He performed the most difficult operations on many Poltava people by saving their lives there in the Poltava province hospital at the end of the century before last. The farmstead of Sklifosovsky was located in the suburban village of Yakivtsi (now, in Kyivskyi City District of Poltava) at the Vorskla riverside. Since 1871 he spent his every summertime at that place and 1900 he settled there permanently. Nikolai Vasilievich informed his daughter Olga in the letter dated December 22, 1889: "I lived in Yakivtsi and went from there to Poltava daily."

In 1887 a school has been built in Yakivtsi at the expense of N. V. Sklifosovsky.

N. V. Sklifosovsky died in Yakivtsi and was buried at the same place. A slab of black labradorite set up at his grave protected by the State. His name, surname, patronymic, lifetime dates and words in Russian: “Burning myself by shining for others” are imprinted in it.
 
A monument to N. V. Sklifosovsky was inaugurated in Poltava on May 25, 1979. It was set in a small park at entrance of the area of the regional hospital. There are a 1.6 m high bust of Sklifosovsky and an inscription: “From the surgeons of Soviet Ukraine and grateful Poltava residents,” on the 2.4 m high granite pedestal. The monument was made by the sculptor O. M. Chernytsky.