Article

Power wheelchair (PWC) users depend on their equipment to reliably transport them
throughout daily activities and allow them to participate fully in community
life. However, as reported by Worobey and colleagues,
PWCs frequently require
repairs and cause users a variety of problems, which can range from annoying to
catastrophic. These authors suggest that comparing the performance of individual
PWC makes and models -a PWC Consumer Reports -might be helpful to inform users
and others about the relative quality of different products. Although a
comparative report is an appealing idea, we suggest that producing meaningful
comparisons of specific PWCs, especially complex rehabilitation PWCs, confronts
significant methodologic and practical hurdles. Challenges include dealing with
small sample sizes for individual products, risk-adjusting outcomes to account
for systematic differences in patterns of use, specifying meaningful outcome
metrics, distinguishing the contributions of manufacturers and PWC suppliers to
suboptimal performance, and disentangling the myriad components of complex
rehabilitation PWCs, which often carry parts from multiple manufacturers. In any
case, most users have little control over their PWC selections, with the policies
of health insurers and other factors largely dictating equipment choices.
Considering these various concerns, we argue that producing a valid and useful
Consumer Reports for PWCs will be difficult and, at least for complex rehabilitation chairs,
will be of limited value.
CI - Copyright (c) 2014 American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine. Published by
Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Langue : ANGLAIS