Manual wheelchair skills capacity and safety of residents of a long-term-care facility.

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.