Hippotherapy is the holistic use of the horse to assist in the rehabilitation of children and adults with a range of physical and emotional challenges. Our project has encouraged hippotherapy teachers and students within Finland, Poland and the United Kingdom to work together, has made our education and hippotherapy more visible and recognised and has positively affected the work we do in this area of specialist education. We have investigated the existing hippotherapy education in the three partnership organisations during the two year project. We have had seven face to face meetings in workshops, seminars and conferences. Shared plans and visions for the project were made in preparatory visits to Poland and Finland. Our work aimed to create Lifelong learning (LLL) mobility opportunities for hippotherapy students and teachers to share knowledge and skills in Finland, Poland and the UK, to identify and clarify essential core curriculum elements and to develop the content and curriculum of Hippotherapy education by the production of joint guidelines and resources for good practice related to the European Qualification Framework . ICT has been used for remote working. During the project there has been constant monitoring and evaluation of our progress towards achieving the project objectives.The results of our work are a consensus statement of Hippotherapy education, a theoretical model supporting the use of the Horse in Hippotherapy and the production of an Equine Checklist and Little Dictionary of Alternative and Augmentative Communication for Hippotherapists as course teaching material. A Conference handbook from workshop 6 and poster of the project have also been produced. Dissemination has been achieved internationally by publication on HETI website (www.frdi.net) and at the 2012 XIV International Congress of Therapeutic Riding in Athens. National and local dissemination by each organisation has been carried out through study days, workshops and seminars.
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