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

Abstract

Coolen AL, Kirby RL, Landry J, MacPhee AH, Dupuis D, Smith C, Best KL, MacKenzie DE, MacLeod DA. Wheelchair Skills Training Program for clinicians: a randomized controlled trial with occupational therapy students. Arch Phys Med Rehabil 2004;85:1160–7. 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.