Page 32 - Mobility Management, July/August 2021

ATP Series
4 Reasons to Love Custom-Molded Seating
and multiple sclerosis who because of her positioning hadn’t been able to drive her power chair for some time.
“‘We want you to get her driving again,’” Laurence remem- bered the rest of the seating team saying. “I’m not a miracle worker. But we did a quick mold in her chair — and she could move the joystick. She looked at me and said, ‘I love you.’ All the people behind me were starting to cry. They hadn’t heard her speak that loud, but now she could suddenly get a good breath, and she could move the chair. That’s cool stuff.”
When Laurence recently saw a client in a group home, she thought a modular system could work: “I always want to look at modular first and rule it out. I’m always looking for as simple as possible, what can be replaced easily, cost effectiveness. And then we went to the person in charge of the home and laid out the pros and cons of each system. She [was] in custom, and you see the seating and not her. I’d love to see this little girl and see her.”
The home manager had two requests, Laurence recalled. First, the manager wanted a system that couldn’t be easily changed or “fiddled” with. Second: “She said, ‘I also need it to be ridiculously incontinence proof. It’s a flood. The diapers just don’t hold it well enough.’”
These multiple issues made Laurence reconsider custom
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seating. “We said, ‘Okay, we’re going to stay with custom, but here’s what we’re going to do. I want to cut her seating down.’ We molded, and I put the molding bags exactly where I wanted the mold to stop. We finished molding, and said, ‘What do you think?’ And [the manager] said, ‘Wow!’ That’s the power of custom seating. The best results come when we have a team with open communication.”
“It is a bit of a hierarchy,” Weddle said, in choosing custom as the seating strategy. “The goal is always to do the least invasive system, to provide the system that’s going to meet the goals of the clinical team, yet at the same time be the easiest thing for the caregivers to use. So, there is a hierarchy of what will work, and what will work for the caregivers.”
“Don’t be scared by it,” Bisson said of custom seating. “I’ve had the opportunity to speak with a number of ATPs who’ve captured molds. I’ve talked to ATPs that have done it so many times, it’s like second nature to them. And I think some of those ATPs who are newer and haven’t had as many mold captures are sometimes hesitant. That’s okay. We tell them: Use your skill set. You have expertise. Be confident in what you can do. It’s an amazing tool that will allow you to provide the end user the best possible solution for them.” m
30 JULY-AUGUST 2021 | MOBILITY MANAGEMENT
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