Course Description/Overview
How does an individual actually live a productive life if they use a manual wheelchair full time with no ability to stand or walk? The answer is in mastery of advanced wheelchair skills and transfers. Specifically, managing doors, transferring off the floor, over-height transfers, stowing a wheelchair into a car, wheelies down inclines and off curbs as well as how to independently ascend curbs and descent stairs with a railing.
This course will teach how a therapist teaches these skills. Students will indeed learn to do these skills but most importantly how to teach them.
Course content will include: how to build success and instill confidence in ability, how to break down a complex skill to component parts, how to sequence skill acquisition and movement analysis, this last is key. How does the therapist know what to correct and how to create success from failure? In addition we will learn a system called Goal Attainment Scaling for outcome measures.