ISPO 2015

The focus of this stage of the project is increasing awareness and knowledge of the emergency wheelchair response among humanitarian organisations, and this month Motivation staff attended a key event for the assistive device sector with this as an objective. The International Society for Prosthetics and Orthotics (ISPO) World Congress, was hosted this year in Lyon. The event is held every three years and is an ideal opportunity for NGOs in the field to meet up and update each other on current projects.

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The week was packed with side meetings and discussions, and with about 4,300 delegates attending the congress from across the world, we hope that we will have increased awareness of the need for inclusion of wheelchair users in disaster response planning at all levels.

As well as general awareness raising, we were able to meet with the newly formed International Society of Wheelchair Professionals and share with them information about the emergency wheelchair package. ISWP have been formed with the aim of helping wheelchair users be provided with the best technology and the best service worldwide, and are an important body for us to be engaging with.

We also met with HI staff that had been involved in the very early stages of the earthquake response in Nepal and were able to get some first-hand feedback on the logistics of prepositioning wheelchairs which was really timely and interesting to hear. We will be posting more detail on this shortly.

All in all a valuable, if exhausting week!