ISPO Short Course on the Management of Cerebral Palsy
Date:14/01/2010-15/01/2010Place:Newcastle, UK
Organizers:
International Society for Prosthetics and Orthetics (ISPO), UK ISPO NMS
About the event:
An international, multidisciplinary group of 24 academic health care professionals and research scientists, all of whom are recognized experts in this subject area, were invited to take part in theISPO Follow-Up Consensus Conference entitled "Recent Developments in Healthcare for Cerebral Palsy: Implications and Opportunities for Orthotics" held at Wolfson College, Oxford, UK in September 2008.
Soon after the conclusion of this very successful exercise the UK ISPO Member Society asked that they be given the opportunity to host the first short course reporting on the conclusions of this conference. Paul Carlton, President of the UK MS served as host and local organizer. A two day seminar was convened in Newcastle Upon Tyne on January 14-15, 2010 to present and discuss those findings.
More than one hundred professionals from the UK and Scandinavia attended. They represented all of the members of the health care team. Not only was the content of the presentations up to date and authoritative, the discussion sessions that followed served to clarify and exchange information between the many disciplines represented. This process amplifies the importance of the team approach to management which is the backbone of ISPO.
Both the original Consensus Conference held in Durham, North Carolina and the update workshop concluded that the strength of available research in the orthotic management of Cerebral Palsy was lacking.
Some of the suggestions for future research emerging from the discussions included:
- Consider the importance of foot ware when evaluating AFO fabrication.
- Existing research is often non-reproducible do to deficient information on methods.
- Orthotist must be involved when orthotic research is conducted.
- Encourage institutional set aside time for research
- Encourage “one off reports”
- Use social media websites for illustrating methods
- Teach better research consumption
- Incorporate research methodology in P&O curriculum
- ISPO organized research methods symposia
- Establish protocols that compare relevancy of gait labs to environment
- Establish data base of outcomes measures
- Facilitate multi center data collection
- Conference on evidence based practice
- Encourage collaborative data bases across multiple institutions
- ISPO fund for supporting research perhaps by a research foundation and donations