News

The Protez Hub Project and Saving Lives, the humanitarian initiative of SCM businesses, continue providing assistance to those Ukrainians who lost their limbs as a result of the armed Russian aggression. In late March, they will launch a one-of-a-kind free Ukrainian-language online educational platform Knowledge Database: Protez Hub for prosthetic specialists and medical professionals. The platform seeks to help Ukrainian specialists improve their understanding of the rehabilitation of an amputee from the moment of injury to using the prosthesis effectively.

The resource will include five lecture courses dedicated to care, rehabilitation, prosthetic treatment, and psychological aspects of the trauma that resulted in amputation of one or more limbs. The project’s partners have made dozens of video lectures to introduce pressing topics in sequence – from making a prosthesis to training with it. In addition to lectures, the platform will include recommendations, questionnaires, charts, programmes, and other tools and files required for work. Along with field experts, the courses will be available to amputees, their relatives and friends for referential use.

Antonina Kumka, the head of Protez Hub, says that the project is one more step toward sustainable development of limb prosthetic treatment and follow-up rehabilitation in Ukraine. “We sought to make interesting, useful and consistent online courses to help amputees and all participants of the recovery process understand the focus areas at each stage. We have built on international and domestic expertise to create a resource that is to become even more relevant in Ukraine because of the war,” she said.

The Saving Lives initiative prioritises expanding the areas of assistance for Ukrainians, said Yuriy Ryzhenkov, CEO of Metinvest Group that co-founded the project.

“Since the war’s outbreak, Saving Lives has been helping everyone who is in need. To meet the new wartime challenges, we have expanded our mission by introducing a large-scale prosthetic treatment and rehabilitation programme for wounded soldiers and civilians, and contributing to the development of the dedicated portal. The online educational platform will help every Ukrainian doctor who cares about people with limb amputations understand all rehabilitation processes and use this knowledge,” he went on to say.

To date, more than 30 Ukrainians undergo prosthetic treatment and 7 have already received modern prostheses from Saving Lives. The initiative reaches out to Metinvest employees and their family members, the military and civilians in the company’s regions of operations.