Manual Wheelchair Skills Capacity and Safety of Residents of a Long-Term-Care Facility

Smith C, Kirby RL. Manual wheelchair skills capacity and safety of residents of a long-term-care facility. Arch Phys Med Rehabil 2011;92:663-9. 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.