ISPO Accredited Training Programmes

The Kobe College of Medical Welfare, Sanda Campus offers 4-year P&O program to produce skilled medical professionals who can work actively worldwide as a Category I Prosthetic-Orthotic professional. The 4-year Prosthetics and Orthotics program at the Kobe College of Medical Welfare, Sanda Campus (hereinafter “KCMWPO4”) is the first 4-year program for P&O training among professional training colleges in Japan.

The KCMWPO4 was established in 2008. This 4-year program offers an accredited advanced diploma program. The advanced diploma is authorized by The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology. The curriculum for the 4-year accredited advanced diploma course in Prosthetics and Orthotics at KCMW is the only training program in Japan.

KCMWPO4 provides unique curricula for P&O students to acquire the basic skills and knowledge for evaluation methods and diagnostic methods in Patient Evaluation in their first year and learn the orthotics design based on diagnoses and evaluations in Seminar for Orthotics Management in the second year. Following their second year of studies, students gain experience performing physical evaluations with actual patients in the course of Clinical Placement. They also consider the patient’s orthotics therapy and provide alternative proposals. Students work together with students from other disciplines such as physical therapy, occupational therapy and speech-language-hearing therapy and discuss how each discipline would approach several patients with representative medical conditions. This series of courses are useful in the training of prosthetists and orthotists who can provide accurate advice to doctors with regards to prescribing orthoses.