Wheelchair skills training program for clinicians: a randomized controlled trial with occupational therapy students

Abstract

Objective: To test the hypothesis that a brief formalized period of wheelchair skills training, added to the standard curriculum, results in significantly greater overall improvements in wheelchair skills than a standard undergraduate occupational therapy (OT) curriculum alone.

Setting: Rehabilitation center.

Design: Randomized controlled trial.

Participants: Eighty-two students in a university undergraduate OT program.

Interventions: All students received the standard university curriculum. The 22 second-year students, randomly allocated to the Wheelchair Skills Training Program (WSTP) group, were also trained (on a single occasion each, in groups of 1-3 at a time) on the 50 skills that make up the WSTP. The mean +/- standard deviation (SD) training time was 121.2+/-33.5 minutes per group.

Main outcome measure: Total percentage score on the Wheelchair Skills Test (WST), Version 2.4.

Results: From before to after intervention, second-year students in the WSTP group increased their mean percentage WST scores +/- SD from 64.8%+/-9.0% to 81.0%+/-5.2%, a 25% improvement (P<.001). Over a comparable period, the 18 students in the second-year control group increased from 66.0%+/-8.0% to 72.4%+/-7.1%, a 9.7% improvement (P=.015). The WSTP group improved to a significantly greater extent (P=.005). For a subset of 8 students in the WSTP group who were retested 9 to 12 months later, the mean WST score was 79.7%+/-4.1%, not significantly less than their WST 2 scores (P=.29). The mean WST score for the 42 students in the fourth-year control group was 73.9%+/-4.1%, significantly lower than the mean postintervention WST score of the second-year students in the WSTP group (P< .0001) and not different from the second-year control group (P=.58).

Conclusions: The WSTP is an effective way to improve the wheelchair-skills performance of OT students. This has implications for the education of all rehabilitation clinicians.