Building rehabilitation capacity from a standing start

Emergency medicine gets the attention, and it should. But the arithmetic that determines a life is what comes afterwards. Rehabilitation is measured in months and years, requires specialist staff who take years to train, and Ukraine simply did not have it at the scale that was suddenly needed.

So capacity was built. International partners funded equipment and prosthetic workshops. Clinical training programmes brought Ukrainian physiotherapists, occupational therapists and prosthetists together with specialists abroad. Hospitals were twinned with European rehabilitation centres. Patients travelled for treatment while domestic capacity was constructed behind them.

The part that is easy to miss

Rehabilitation is a profession, not a machine. You can ship a prosthetic limb in a week; you cannot ship the practitioner who fits it, adjusts it over months and teaches someone to walk again. The most valuable assistance in this field has been training, and it is the assistance whose effects will last longest.