“Enhanced mobility driven by better multidisciplinary treatments and care can bring the powerful energies of an empowered amputee population to benefit all people.”
Charles Dankmeyer, MiFF President
Most of us have seen inspiring images of amputees participating in the Paralympics, a local amputee participating in a sporting event, in TV advertisements, or success stories of returning veterans. Unfortunately, those amputees are the exception and not the norm. The level of care needed to reach those achievements is a distant dream for most of the 2,000,000 U.S. citizens with an amputation.
Experts generally agree that the best results in amputee care result from a multidisciplinary approach, yet few amputees have the opportunity and resources to receive such care. Integrated care plans developed through the collaboration of many specialties including surgeons, physiatrists, prosthetists, physical and occupational therapists, biomedical engineers, rehabilitation psychologists, and social scientists are known to provide the best results. Despite this knowledge, few higher education institutions provide a cross-discipline exposure to students in a rehabilitation science doctoral program.
The Mobility is Freedom Fund (MiFF) is a nonprofit organization and we are a team of forward-thinking education innovators in education, developing strategies to enhance higher education in rehabilitation sciences with a focus on amputee care. We believe that all persons who experience limb loss have a right to access multidisciplinary rehabilitation treatment.
With the goal to transform clinical care for amputees. MiFF has funded the development of a new Rehabilitation Sciences Doctoral Program at Johns Hopkins University with a leadership gift of $1,000,000.
Mobility is Freedom Fund’s higher education fund provides scholarships to promising PhD candidates who are participating in a multidisciplinary rehabilitation sciences doctoral program. This focus aligns with the need to advance care models across many specialties to develop the best treatment options for the best outcomes for each person. Based on institutional nominations, the program provides discretionary funding to promising pre-doctoral students. The award is based on accomplishment of scholarly research as well as a compelling commitment to future rehabilitation research.
The Fund provides unrestricted grants for the final two years of a student’s PhD program. The amount of the grant is based on institutional costs and needs. Our existing advisory partners include The University of Delaware, Northwestern University, The University of Washington, and Johns Hopkins University.
Individuals who hold a PhD degree are the leaders, educators, and researchers who publish articles on amputee care in peer reviewed journals. There are over 400 government funded grants on limb loss, many from The National Institutes of Health. Remarkably, there are only 5 or 6 qualified principal investigators who are available for those projects. Additionally, several of those investigators are reaching retirement age and there is an urgent need to develop and sustain an ongoing pipeline of graduate PhDs with specialized knowledge of amputee care. In the absence of scholarly research papers published in peer reviewed scientific journals, the necessary level of care will not be provided. Medicare, Medicaid, private insurances all require science-based research demonstrating treatment efficacy. Without the researchers and their completed and published studies, optimal care is denied by insurers as “experimental and unproven”.
Through these research-directed scholarships, we will develop the future researchers, educators, and leaders who will publish research in peer reviewed scientific journals, and they will develop the appropriate multidisciplinary treatment protocols for care. This will equip clinicians with evidence-based guidelines to achieve optimal outcomes for all levels of persons with an amputation. The graduates we support will be the researchers who have a broad understanding of limb loss across multiple medical disciplines, engineering, public health, and public policy and their work will provide the basis for delivering appropriate care.
Opening the doors for amputees will benefit our nation and our world as these empowered amputees deliver their enhanced creativity, insights, and talents to the workforce and community. Through these efforts, societal costs--both in resources and lost talents—will be diminished. Mobility provides better long-term health, reducing long-term health costs.
