Human resources in the wheelchair services in England

Under the reformed National Health Service structure in England a wide variety of methods of service delivery for assistive technology have evolved. For example some larger wheelchair services use multidisciplinary teams backed by large engineering departments, while other, smaller services rely on external contractors. The objective of this research was to record the patterns of human resources across the wheelchair services in England, and to explore the interrelationships between key topics within the theme areas of user satisfaction, service process, management, and staffing. A pilot study of eight services was followed by structured interviews in 70 of the remaining 140 services, taking care to include a complete geographical spread. At each service four people were interviewed: manager, therapist, rehabilitation engineer and administrator, and questionnaires sent to 20 users selected at random. Correspondence between the answers enabled a consistency check on the data. The data was analysed by constructing 23 derived numerical variables to represent topics within the theme areas.