Summer 2009

As I begin to prepare for my summer courses, I am returning to my original concept for this blog: How might I further investigate the impact of therapeutic riding on children and families? I decided to go back to the beginning, the North American Riding for the Handicapped Association. I was curious about where they are heading as an organization, wondering if any trends were apparent based on their membership increases/decreases, etc. Thus, I found the following:

NARHA Centers Offering Specialty Programs
2005 2006 2007 2008
Hippotherapy 211 188 168 227
Equine Facilitated Learning 111 112 110 140
Equine Facilitated Psychotherapy 63 60 54 77
Driving 39 44 46 54
Interactive Vaulting 62 58 45 65

I wonder about the increase / decrease / increase in hippotherapy programming. These programs must be facilitated by individuals like occupational therapists. There is a significant increase (no stats worked here :) in 2008. So are individuals more interested? Are therapists? Is insurance willing to foot the bill? The number of facilitate learning programs has also increased dramatically. Perhaps there is just better recordkeeping? Better training for program leaders? More interest or acceptability by families?
I think I will try to find what I can about the trends from my contacts at Milestones. Since resigning from the board in 2008, I have not been in touch with the programming aspects of Milestones.

www.narha.org