Prosthetic care specialists from Canada and the United States will be in Ukraine April 26 through May 8 as part of the Ukraine Prosthetic Assistance Project to provide prosthetic care and rehabilitation. Ukrainian prosthetic care specialists from Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Odesa, Kharkiv, Khmelnytskyi, and Lviv will be trained by the Canadian and U.S. volunteers. Five candidates with complex amputations will also be fitted and more will be assessed for future fitting by the newly trained Ukrainian prosthetists.
The project is run by Euromaidan Canada (Ukrainian Canadian Congress Toronto) and Canada-Ukraine Foundation, in partnership with the U.S. nonprofit ProsthetiKa, which was founded by Jon Batzdorff, CPO, chair of the United States Member Society of the International Society for Prosthetics and Orthotics.
Batzdorff said it is necessary to create the conditions to establish prosthetic care in Ukraine because receiving this treatment abroad does not always achieve the desired results. “All prosthetics need technical support, they must be set correctly, functionally, and properly maintained,” he was quoted as saying by the Interfax-Ukraine news agency. “A person can get a very good prosthesis abroad, but a week or month later after his return, this person will return to the initial situation as there is nobody to [maintain] the prosthetic.”
