The necessity for treatment paths for lower limb prosthetics : All that glitters is not gold!

Abstract

Frequently occurring problems in the fitting of leg prostheses are either, for aprosthetic fitting, insufficiently resilient leg stumps or insufficiently adapted prostheses. For this reason, there has been ademand at the political level to establish treatment pathways and aquality standard for the care of people after leg amputations. How can ajoint, interdisciplinary approach to the provision of aids be developed? Does interdisciplinary care of amputees lead to an improvement in the quality of care? Acompendium "Quality standard in the field of lower extremity prostheses" was compiled and presented at the OT World in Leipzig in 2018. The basic principle is treatment pathways for the interdisciplinary care of all amputation levels of the lower extremities. The result is acompendium that represents the current "gold standard" in orthopaedic care after lower limb amputations. The compendium not only describes the treatment paths in detail but also makes demands on the quality of the result of the surgical amputation, as well as the goals of residual limb conditioning and the demands on the quality of the fitting of the prosthesis. Atraffic light system is used to make recommendations, restrictions and rejections, thus defining the gold standard. If all the professions involved (doctors, CPOs, physiotherapists) do not work separately but rather together with the necessary expertise and routine, the quality of care for amputees will improve, and at the same time, the health care system will become more cost efficient.