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Oct 1 2018

NATO-Ukraine Trust Fund marks milestones in rehabilitation of wounded service personnel

In September 2018, the NATO-Ukraine Medical Rehabilitation Trust Fund marked several key milestones on its journey of providing support for wounded Ukrainian service personnel.

On 23 September, officials gathered in Lviv for the closing ceremony of the NATO-Ukraine "Back to Life" Sport Rehabilitation Camps. Seventeen different camps took place at the National Paralympic Centre between August 2016 and September 2018. They brought together around 170 wounded Ukrainian service personnel and 170 civilians from the Donbas region and provided them with psychological and physical rehabilitation. The camps were a key aspect of the Trust Fund's commitment to providing sports rehabilitation to assist in the recovery of wounded personnel. The Trust Fund worked with the National Assembly of Persons with Disabilities in Ukraine to provide these highly successful camps.

The NATO Support and Procurement Agency office in Ukraine organised a competition at the Kharkiv CrossFit Club on 25 September 2018 for veterans who had received a total of 11 of the latest sports prosthesis from the NATO-Ukraine Medical Rehabilitation Trust Fund. The prosthetics were the first to be produced by Ukrainian specialists, thanks to the work of the Trust Fund in developing capacity in this important area. This CrossFit competition was organised with the support of the Commissioner of the President of Ukraine on the rehabilitation of ATO participants, as well as the Ukrainian Research Institute for Prosthetics, Prostheses Design and Rehabilitation in Kharkiv.

The competition marked the beginning of a two-year education programme for orthotists and prosthetists in Ukraine provided by the Trust Fund, which will contribute new knowledge and build capacity in this key area for Ukraine's medical rehabilitation system.

Since it began in 2016, the NATO-Ukraine Medical Rehabilitation Trust Fund has assisted more than 500 wounded soldiers in their physical, psychological and vocational rehabilitation. It has also made a significant contribution to increasing the capacity of Ukraine's medical rehabilitation system to provide care for wounded personnel, including through training key rehabilitation staff and providing state-of-the-art rehabilitation equipment to hospitals across the country.