Manual Wheelchair Skills Training for Elderly Residents of Long-Term-Care Facilities and Their Caregivers: Pilot Evaluation of Efficacy

Skills training is an important component of the wheelchair-provision process, but has received surprisingly little attention in the scientific literature. The Wheelchair Skills Training Program (WSTP) has proven to be safe, practical, inexpensive and efficacious when used to train wheelchair users in a rehabilitation-center setting, community-based wheelchair users, caregivers and clinicians. Although some of the participants in the earlier studies were elderly, the WSTP has never been evaluated in the long-term-care (LTC) setting, where additional considerations (e.g., dementia, community access) are relevant. The objective of this pilot project is to evaluate the efficacy of the WSTP in the LTC setting. We will study 25 elderly manual wheelchair users and their caregivers. The participants will undergo the WSTP, consisting of up to 8 30-minute training sessions. The primary outcome measure will be improvement in total percentage scores on the Wheelchair Skills Test for both the wheelchair users and the caregivers. This pilot study will allow us to better predict whether a multi-centre randomized controlled trial would be worthwhile and to plan such a study. The WSTP appears to have the potential to make a valuable impact on the health, activities and social participation of elderly manual wheelchair users and their caregivers in the LTC setting.