Disabled Facilities Grant

Morglin

I think, perhaps, it depends on the OT, and the council involved.

Where my adaptations were concerned, I have to be fair and say that cost didn't seem to be an issue with them , although funding had to be agreed at panel.

They listened to what i said I needed, we agreed all things beforehand, and the contractors did a wonderful job.

The OT suggested things, such a a closamat (think that was the name!) toilet and other things I hadn't even heard of.

This was a few years ago, but it had no complaints whatsoever, and it made life much easier.

However, wheelchair services, which is NHS, drove me demented with their nonsense - I eventually threw the towel in with them, and just purchased the ones I needed.

Lin

cattermole

I agree Morlin the OT you get is a massive determining factor.

Mr_Lawnmower

Morglin wrote: »

However, wheelchair services, which is NHS, drove me demented with their nonsense - I eventually threw the towel in with them, and just purchased the ones I needed.

I think wheelchair services are immensely blinkered in many parts of the country.


My current NHS indoor/outdoor power chair is dropping apart - literally. It's an obsolete model for which the entire parts inventory has been deleted by the manufacturer, so it is a definite write off.

Despite requesting that wheelchair services did nothing without consulting me first, they decided unilaterally to replace my existing with a stock chair with 22 inch seat width at what I thought was an assessment appointment. I don't need a chair that wide and it won't clear a standard 700mm door frame, making the chair unusable at home and in every building I regularly use. The chair they attempted to give me also had an insufficient weight limit - in winter clothes and with a modest carrying allowance, I would certainly be over the 130kg maximum user weight. I had to make a snap decision to reject the chair, because it would have been worse than my existing disintegrating chair.

They bought me a new pressure relief cushion for this 22 inch monstrosity, broke the hygiene seals on it despite my protests that the chair was no use to me, and this now means that a cushion I've sat on for less than 90 seconds will be incinerated when I hand it in. When I protested about not having a usable cushion, I was told to cram the cushion into my existing chair to the utter despair of both me and my NHS physio, as compressing the cushion destroys its pressure relief properties. The 22 inch cushion they bought is sat in my loft, essentially unused and unusable. I'm using the non-pressure relief cushion from my NHS manual chair because the gel pack split on my last 20 inch pressure relief cushion, writing it off.

I'm convinced that some idiot ordered a load of these 22 inch chairs, as I know this was a chair from stock. Wheelchair services don't seem to know what to do with them, so it appears their strategy is to palm them off onto anyone they can. Few people need such a wide chair and almost everyone who does will exceeed the maximum user weight of these chairs. The logical thing would be to strip most of them for parts for other Harriers and cut the frames up as not worth storing - but that expects common sense that wheelchair services seem to lack.


We've wasted more money on this kind of stupidity, as well as on pointless assessments by wheelchair services and other parts of the NHS who are attempting to persuade wheelchair services to sort this out, than it would have cost to buy me the replacement chair and cushion everyone else involved in my care agrees I need. My GP and I agree that it is a travesty that wheelchair services regard success as minimising the budget for issued equipment and don't look at the wider costs to the NHS and the public sector. They've spent more money not sorting me out than they would have in sorting me out. I'm also fed up of being treated like an idiot by them - I've got far more experience of living with a power chair than they have, and it is quite wrong that they refuse to respect my intelligence and autonomy.


The next battle will be attempting to get my entitlement converted into a voucher so that I can buy the chair I need before my current one drops apart. Unfortunately, power chair vouchers are discretionary unless I've missed a change in the regulations - it's only manual chair vouchers that are an entitlement.

Like you, Lin, the time has come where it's better to buy a chair and move on, not least as my car desperately needs changing and it is unwise to buy a new car before I change the chair.

If wheelchair services won't voucher my NHS power chair entitlement, I will take whatever chair they give me and put it in the garage, so as to preserve my underlying NHS power chair entitlement. Parking a usable chair in the garage would be a waste of a chair, but I may not be in a position to buy another power chair in the future and can't face going through the battles to re-establish my NHS power chair entitlement in the future.

Morglin

My problem was that a manual wheelchair is no use to me - if I am bad enough for the wheelchair, I have no upper arm strength, so cannot self propel.

However, because I am not a 24/7 wheelie user, I could not get a powered chair.

So, I could have a manual I couldn't use, couldn't have a power chair I could use, and we all ended up exhausted.

Finally, I removed myself from their la-la land, and just went out and bought the powerchair I needed.

Lin

cattermole

You are correct Mr L they do get tied in to certain suppliers, their favourites!!

We had a situation where we had to move our daughter into residential school because of problems with Wheelchair services thereby accessing better/more flexible services in another area, that ended up getting billed back to the Local NHS anyway.

When she was very young, one particular Physio was so obsessed with a particular system it caused our daughter to have serious stomach bleeds from being kept bolt upright in the system and she cried and was continually distressed in it.

It doesn't just apply to power wheelchairs it also applies to specialist seating systems as well.