Archive for May, 2009

Mobility Aids and the disabled in My Community: One person’s ongoing journey of awareness

It has been more or less ten years now since I originally started working in the field of Community Health care, and it only just dawned upon me just how much I have come to learn about the assorted issues that the folks I work among have to cope with every day. [spin]When I first began my employment as a Resident Care Aid I didn’t especially realize that a good deal with reference to how people deal with disabilities on a daily basis in their communities,excluding what had been taught to me in the course of classes by my instructors. To be honest though, it is one thing to be told what matters to a disabled person and something else to in fact get a first hand appreciation of what truly matters to somebody living in the community, to gain an understanding of what their day to day challenges really are. Before working in community care I couldn’t have relayed to you much of anything as regards what a mobility aid is much less any of the important differences between them.

Before going into healthcare, I knew what a motorized wheel chair was but wasn’t in actuality sure what was intended by the expression power chair or whatwere the differences between the electric wheelchair operating on a series of gears instead of a series of belts; I had seen personal medical scooters being used by disabled persons and the aged but at the same time if you asked me what a medical mobility scooter was and who it was best suited for, I wouldn’t really have any clue.

Proceding still further into the domicile, I did not have any perception of the reality of such mobility aids as lift chairs, and although I had already had a restricted exposure to such medical devices as stair chair lifts previously, I didn’t realize the more fine differences that are present concerning the numerous makes or models of such devices. With succeeding articles, I would like to grasp the occasion to in a way summarize these things – these tid bits of sensible awareness that I have acquired over a stretch, so that anyone else out there with a sense of curiosity towards such matters might also learn something new.