| DOD Puts $575,000
into CSUDH
Prosthetics-Orthotics Program
The U.S. Department of Defense awarded $575,000 in
November, 2005 to the California State University Dominguez
Hills Orthotics and Prosthetics Program. The first
of the funds were received in late December and are
already being put to use to expand the facilities at
the Ossur North America Inc. center in Aliso Viejo
and to make room for more students.
Ossur, an international prosthetics and orthotics
company based in Iceland, is donating the use of several
tens of thousands of dollars worth of rooms, facilities,
and equipment at its center to the CSUDH program. That
is in addition to the approximately $300,000 Ossur
spent to build the custom training facility, patient
examination area, utilities, and other outlays in support
of the CSUDH program.
“That Department of Defense money is for the
growth of this program,” said a pleased and enthusiastic Scott
Hornbeak, clinical professor of health
sciences and coordinator of the Orthotics
and Prosthetics Program. Hornbeak is also a Certified
Prosthetist Orthotist and is a 25-year veteran of the
business world, including as a vice president of a
prosthesis company, NovaCare Inc., for six years.
“What we’re doing is growing from 28 graduates
a year to 48 graduates a year,” Hornbeak explains. “That
means that between 20 percent and 25 percent of the
200 to 220 orthotics and prosthetics graduates annually
in the United States will come from the Dominguez Hills
program. We will grow four people in prosthetics, which
is the artificial-limb side, and 16 a year in orthotics,
which is the braces side. That is, external braces,
such as for scoliosis.”
The Department of Defense was
willing to earmark the more than half-a-million-dollars
in funds for the program because of what it could
mean for veterans, Hornbeak says. “Christopher
Cox, now head of the Securities and Exchange Commission,
put in a good word for us when he was a congressman.
Jerry Lewis (R-41, California) also put in a good
word for us, and Senator Feinstein (D-CA), and so
did Ossur, which is an international corporation.
Lewis is the chair of the House Committee on Appropriations,
and he wrote funding for these things into a bill
and earmarked some money for our program. He especially
had in mind how our work could help the veterans
from Afghanistan and Iraq, but there are also all
the people in the world who are victims of disaster,
or uncleared land mines, or industrial accidents.”
The Department of Defense funding
is for one year, Hornbeak says, but he intends to
spread it over three years “because you just can’t complete
what we’re planning in a year.” Much of
it, however, will be spent in the first 12 months on
expanded facilities. “To request funds such as
these, you have to submit a substantial proposal, very
much like a grant proposal. Also, like a grant proposal,
it must have a scientific basis and there must be a
product at the end. We will be submitting a report
on what it takes, and what actually happens, when you
grow a program such as ours as much as we’re
going to grow it. We’ll be including such things
as what the differences are in administration, teaching,
curriculum, equipment, and scheduling.”
The program coordinator says
there will be documentation of all aspects as the
growth continues, and much of it will be centered
on the students: “Student-centered
outcome is the name of the game, and we’re refining
and developing more outcome-oriented tools, then testing
what we do, and making sure the students learn.”
The students are given the
material in three ways, Hornbeak says. With everything
taught at the center, he says, “there is always
lecture, always demonstration, and always laboratory.
It covers the different ways learners prefer to learn.
Some do better listening, some by watching, some
by doing, and most by a combination.”
Whatever a student’s preferred
way of learning is, hands-on is also the name of the
game. “We’re
very hands-on here,” he says, walking by the
rows of lifelike foot shells of various shades of colors
that go over the mechanisms inside, shelves and boxes
of state-of-the-art manufactured knee joints
donated by Ossur and various other companies around
the world, molds, pads, braces, grinders, molders,
and tables with specialized vices and other tools. “The
students actually make the products here. We don’t
yet have the ability to cover them with insurance or
do the follow up, so we can’t actually deliver
them to users. It’s part of the reason this program
is so expensive, and why we appreciate all the support
we’ve been given. These things need a lot of
components.”
If what the students produce
cannot be insured, and if follow-up support can’t
be provided to those who use the prosthetics and
orthotics, then they cannot be sold, or even donated.
Unless that situation changes, whatever is produced
is produced strictly for learning purposes.
“But,” Hornbeak points out, his enthusiasm
never waning, “when the students leave here,
they get a lot of job offers. There aren’t nearly
enough practitioners in the United States. Some of
our students—and instructors, for that matter—also
work in Hollywood.” One instructor, Glen Ham-Rosebruck,
a 38-year practitioner and a victim of polio when he
was five months old, made the leg braces used by actor
Jon Voight when he portrayed Franklin Delano Roosevelt
in the 2001 movie “Pearl Harbor.”
“When they leave here, Hornbeak
says, “they
go into residency. What they do here is called primary
education. They get a bachelor’s degree, then
they come here for the clinical part, then they go
into a residency. But, once they leave here, because
we teach in three different ways and have lots of hands-on,
they can do the work, both in prosthetics and orthotics.
They can see patients. But they have to work under
supervision for awhile and get the practical experience.
It’s paid, as with the medical model of residency.
It’s one year of residency. If they decide to
go into both prosthetics and orthotics, as I did, then
it would be two years of residency. We have a lot of
students who go from here to Hanger Orthopedic Group
Incorporated, which bought NovaCare a few years ago.
Mine is a trusted name there, they know me and my students.
Well, in fact, there are only about 5,000 practitioners
in the entire U.S. right now, so most of us know each
other.”
“I’ll tell you our plans,” said
the coordinator, his enthusiasm still bubbling high. “In
three years we want this to be a master’s program.
Right now, it’s a six-month certificate program
for those students who already have a bachelor’s
degree, or it is a B.A. degree in Health Science, Prosthetics
Option. That’s another reason I want to document
all of the outcomes for the report for these funds
that we will be submitting in three years, to prepare
the program for a master’s degree.
“Sometime before the three years is up, I’m
hoping we get permission to go for more funding,” Hornbeak
says. “Funding to be able to keep the program
at a high level and funding to start a master’s
degree program. We just have to make sure this continues
to be seen as a worthy program.”
–Russell Hudson
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