April 17 marked the official opening and blessing of the new Tan Yan Kee Building, home to the Philippine School of Prosthetics and Orthotics (PSPO) at the University of East Ramon Magsaysay Memorial Medical Center Inc. (UERMMMCI), Quezon City. Dignitaries from the government, the university, and PSPO’s primary donor the Tokyo, Japan-based Nippon Foundation were in attendance.
In October 2010, the Nippon Foundation and the U.K.-based Cambodia Trust pledged to give a $7 million, ten-year grant for the PSPO curriculum through a memorandum of understanding they signed with UERMMMCI. The PSPO will be under the UERMMMCI College of Allied Rehabilitation Sciences and will be based on World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines and International Society of Prosthetics and Orthotics standards (ISPO).
The school is the first of its kind in the Philippines, a country with 4.5 million people with disabilities. The first cohort of students is coming to the end of their first full year of P&O training.
