HETI Educational webinar by Blanca Zegers Larraín @ 24 November 2026 17:00 (CET)
The Horse as a Path to Human Functioning: A Systemic Bridge Between Clinic and Stable
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What is our webinar about?
Equine-assisted services live at a crossroads between two worlds — the clinical and the equestrian — that too often speak different languages. This webinar proposes functioning as the shared, systemic goal that unites them: not a sum of isolated skills, but the whole person acting, relating and participating in real life. Drawing on the WHO ICF framework and years of interdisciplinary practice, we will explore how the horse — read through different clinical lenses (sensorimotor, communicative, social-emotional, cognitive) — becomes an active agent that drives functioning across all its dimensions. The relationship between human and horse is itself the therapeutic space where functional change emerges. We will also address a practical gap: equine-assisted therapies need shared constructs that connect clinical observation with what actually happens in the saddle and in nature. We will introduce Eco-ICF, an ICF-based ecological observation tool developed to build that bridge — reading functioning from within the human–equine interaction.

About the author
Blanca Zegers Larraín
Occupational Therapist
Blanca Zegers is a Chilean occupational therapist, 41, whose life has run along two parallel tracks that she eventually chose to bring together: horses and people. Connected to horses from her earliest years through family heritage, she rode competitively until the age of 27 and trained as a pony riding instructor (Gallop 7) with the French Equestrian Federation in Chile. In parallel, she devoted her clinical career to pediatric rehabilitation. In 2016, motherhood led her to the south of Chile in search of nature and calm to raise her children — and there the two tracks finally met. Deciding to deepen that bond between horse and clinical practice, she trained with the American Hippotherapy Association (AHA) in the United States. The need for true interdisciplinary work, together with the therapeutic power of the natural territory she now calls home, led her to design and found Fundación Bayos: a place where nature and horses become cutting-edge technologies for pediatric rehabilitation and development, grounded in clinical reasoning and evidence-based practice. Seven years on, seeking to grow her team's training in equine-assisted services, Fundación Bayos joined Svitání Academy, further updating and strengthening its clinical practice. Blanca is driven by teamwork, by the living, ever-changing nature of working with animals and people, and above all by real change in her clients' quality of life. She finds joy in research and innovation, convinced that practice and theory must constantly feed one another — the very reason she is drawn to HETI: to learn, and to contribute.
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