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Disability equipment, wheelchairs and the occupational health report, victim support and advice, rehabilitation and assessment and mentoring from someone who was seriously injured in a car accident
WHEELCHAIRS
Remember, Section 2(4) Law Reform (Personal Injuries) Act 1948 and restitutio in integrum applies to wheelchairs as it does for all privately purchased articles.
So, what are your wheelchair needs? The NHS again will provide you with your wheelchair needs. They will either allocate the wheelchair to you or you may be able to access the Wheelchair Voucher Scheme.
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victim support and rehabilitation.
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rehabilitation equipment.
This scheme allocates a sum of money for you to purchase privately your own wheelchair. Needless to say the cost of wheelchairs is enormous. Mentor Experiences can recommend some of the best providers of private wheelchairs and allied services ie maintenance and insurance. There is such a closed market for disability aids that those retailers that have accessed this market have put huge mark up prices onto the article. Be wary of the different suppliers, shop around to get the best deal. You may find the internet a good tool to obtain the best prices. Please click on any of our banner links to obtain competent suppliers.
In assessing your wheelchair needs you need to think for now and for the future. You also need to think through where and how you require wheelchairs. For example you live in a house, not a bungalow, so a wheelchair upstairs and downstairs may be needed. You may need a powerchair if your body strength is not great, try using a manual chair up a hill!
Once bought you will need to assess, are you going to do the pushing or do you need someone to push the chair? Where they are going to be stored? You will need to assess how you are going to transport them? You will need to assess what other ancillary equipment you will need to buy to ensure you overcome areas that are not immediately obvious to you? Now let me expand on these areas.
You need to think for now and for the future.
This area will rely heavily on your existing circumstances immediately after the index accident. Are you single, in a permanent relationship, married, married with children or are you living with family? What were your hobbies and lifestyle before the accident? Could certain wheelchairs, powerchairs and specialised combination wheelchairs and attachments help restore your lifestyle?
Consider a married couple with a growing family and the victim's multiple wheelchair needs. A lightweight foldable manual wheelchair and an attachment that converted the manual wheelchair into a portable powered wheelchair, a heavyweight powerchair and a powertrike wheelchair for cross country use may be needed. Note the difference between powerchair and portable powered wheelchair. There are cases for uses for both systems notably an ability to take a wheelchair adaptable for taking abroad via a plane. Powerchairs are too heavy for taking abroad among other practical situations.
How and when you will use the wheelchairs that you buy?
Again, this area will rely heavily on your existing circumstances at the time you want to buy the wheelchairs. You may wish to wait for the Occupational Therapist to complete her report to see that the report recommends the purchase of the items.
You may think that it will be too long a wait for this report to come to you. In our experience when it was decided that it was time to buy wheelchairs we researched and tried to 'test drive' as many wheelchairs that we could find. We suggest that you visit a Mobility Roadshow which will give you the opportunity to do this, keeping your travel costs and overnight accommodation costs receipts for future noting in the appropriate schedule.
If you type in "Mobility Roadshow" into a search engine on the internet you will find the venues of such shows very easily. There is a very large Mobility Roadshow held at Donnington Park every year round about June. Tip: Always take your driving licence with you, if you have one, as many of the exhibitors will not allow you to drive the exhibits without one.
Another avenue for you to explore is subscribing to a disability magazine. There are quite a few on the market.
I would like to emphasise the fact that you must decide what is best for you. When the report by the Occupational Therapist is finally done expect to see a comment on the purchases that you have already made. The comment will generally say that you have chosen to buy such and such make of wheelchair. The Occupational Therapist should then allow the cost of this in her report. She will go on to state whether it is in line with the type that she recommends for you. She should then give a time period which your wheelchair will need replacing. This could be anything from 3 to 10 years depending on the amount of usage the wheelchair will get.
Maintenance costs and insurance costs will also be added to the report. You should look at these costs in any event as they are expensive to replace should you run into problems. Normally purchases made in good faith will be supported and recoverable even if they are in time shown not to be what you should have bought. However you do not really want to get into that position, items bought that are not really suitable have usually been bought in haste. The moral of this is to research, research and research.
Continuing with Equipment and in particular wheelchairs
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