This is so true. It’s been a while since I’ve had a manual chair, but Complex Rehab Technology powerchairs are like endangered animals that die of stress if you look at them funny. Day to day use in their natural habitat and they’re mostly fine, but if you drop anything that’s a very expensive mistake (the controller alone on my chair costs £3000, it’s not unheard of for a whole wheelchair to cost upwards of £20,000)
Because of that price tag, in the UK most people who rely on NHS funding for a CRT powerchair don’t have access to funding for a backup chair. I’d imagine this is similar in other places. Without my chair I’m completely housebound with no independent mobility.
That means if you drop and break my chair I can’t get to my workplace, can’t access healthcare, do my shopping, sit in the garden, visit my elderly relatives or housebound friends, or anything at all that means leaving the flat.
It can take so long to get new parts for a powerchair and even longer to get assessed for a whole new chair. Where I live if you can’t get to the wheelchair clinic (say because someone threw your only means of mobility down a flight of stairs) you’re waiting even longer for the assessment to get prescribed a new chair and the wait for any new part to be fitted is also longer because there are only so many engineers, OTs and physios and making house calls takes much longer per visit.
Also like… if you trip and drop a 200kg powerchair on yourself then you’ll probably get experience first hand just how shitty the world is to wheelchair users. Because ouch.
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