Posture and pressure management: social psychological explanations for compliance with use of clinically prescribed seating functions.

This report summarises a project conducted with users of powered wheelchairs to explore their experiences of their prescribed chair features. A series of semi-structured interviews were conducted with UK users of powered wheelchairs, with a small number of international users being included for comparison. The interviews were subject to thematic analysis to identify common themes as well as being systematically reviewed and classified for perceived benefits/barriers to use as identified by the participants themselves. These results revealed confusion about the clinical benefits of prescribed features with participants focussing on the potential functional benefits/issues with their chair features. This meant that participants based their use of prescribed features on beliefs about their utility, “worked around” features that were not perceived as functionally useful or intuitive to engage with and described different experiences of having their features demonstrated or explained to them. Recommendations are made to highlight functional as well as clinical benefits, to explore therapists’ experiences of their practice, to consider different ways that information could be presented and to explore uses of social support and innovative technologies in future work.