Today, the defender is learning to re-orient himself in space and feel the world around him by touch. The specialists of the National Rehabilitation Center UNBROKEN are helping him with this.

Oleksandr Yurchenko is a 36-year-old volunteer from Pryluky, Chernihiv region. The soldier was seriously wounded in late November 2023 in the Kupyansk sector. It was a mortar attack. Oleksandr remembers feeling his arms and face cut, and his eyes turned black. In order to survive, he had to get out of the shelling at random.

Oleksandr walked blindly through the woods and miraculously came across a dugout of his “friends”. The wounded defender was evacuated from the front line to a Kharkiv hospital. He says he did not even ask if he would see again. He says he immediately realized he had lost his sight forever.

“I am not the kind of person who gives up. Life goes on,” Oleksandr says at the UNBROKEN Center, where he is undergoing rehabilitation and adapting to life in new circumstances. Now he is working with an occupational therapist who is developing an individualized training program for the patient. Together with the specialist, the defender learns to navigate in space, recognize household items and even use a computer.

Rehabilitation of the blind is a highly demanded area today. The number of wounded defenders who have partially or completely lost their sight is increasing with each passing day of the war.

According to the National Health Service of Ukraine, only from February 2022 to July 2023, 38,870 people were diagnosed with blindness and visual impairment for the first time.

According to the UNDP report “Rehabilitation of People with Visual Impairments: Situation Analysis”, Ukraine

– There is no clearly defined list and procedure for providing rehabilitation services for people with visual impairments;

– There are no community-based rehabilitation services and no conceptual vision for their organization and funding;

– lack of appropriately trained staff to work with visually impaired persons.

At the same time, higher education institutions still do not have certified training programs for physical and occupational therapists to work with blind patients.

Therefore, specialists of rehabilitation centers have to develop such programs on their own. The specialists of the UNBROKEN Center have been working on them as part of the joint project with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) “Seeing Victory: A Rehabilitation Program for People with Visual Impairments,” which was implemented with the financial support of the Japanese government. The project purchased special equipment for the recovery and adaptation of such patients, and developed a new rehabilitation model.

It includes work on adaptation and development of vital skills in the new environment, such as spatial orientation, mobility, housekeeping, telephone and computer use.

In addition, as part of this project, the UNBROKEN Center will be provided with equipment for eye prosthetics and training for prosthetic ophthalmologists, physiotherapists, and a psychologist. All of this demonstrates a comprehensive approach and the creation of all the necessary conditions for the rehabilitation of patients with visual impairments.

UNBROKEN Ukraine: treatment, rehabilitation, prosthetics, reintegration of Ukrainians in Ukraine.