Article

OBJECTIVES: To evaluate the manual wheelchair skills capacity and safety of
residents of a long-term-care (LTC) facility. Our secondary objectives were to
describe the wheelchairs that the participants used and to document the
participants' perceptions of their assessment experiences. DESIGN: A
cross-sectional, descriptive, mixed-methods study. SETTING: One hundred and
seventy-five bed LTC veterans' facility. PARTICIPANTS: Manual wheelchair users
(N=13), a sample of convenience consisting of 10 men and 3 women, with a mean +/-
SD age of 86.8+/-6.4 years. INTERVENTIONS: None. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES:
Wheelchair Skills Test (WST), version 4.1, the Wheelchair Specification Form, and
qualitative observations. RESULTS: The mean +/- SD total WST scores for capacity
and safety were 35.3%+/-15.4% and 92.5%+/-6.1%. The mean +/- SD number of
sessions required was 3.0+/-1.1 and the mean +/- SD total time required was
54.8+/-20.2 minutes. The analysis of the individual skills and participants
provided valuable insights. Only 1 (8%) of the 13 wheelchairs was considered to
have proper components and set-up for self-propulsion. Participants generally
reported enjoying the wheelchair-skills experience. CONCLUSIONS: The residents of
a LTC veterans' facility whom we studied had significant difficulties when
attempting a set of manual wheelchair skills, but they were generally safe. Many
of their wheelchairs were less than ideal for self-propulsion. However, these
participants enjoyed being challenged to perform wheelchair skills. If these
findings are representative, they may have implications for the
wheelchair-provision process in the LTC setting.
CI - Copyright (c) 2011 American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine. Published by
Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Langue : ANGLAIS