Wheelchair donation in a low-resources setting: Utilization, challenges and benefits of wheelchairs provided through a specialized seating programme in Haiti
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To describe a 6-month follow-up of a specialized paediatric wheelchair and seating programme in Haiti. DESIGN: Descriptive design using a structured survey and open-ended questions. METHODS: Concurrent with a seating and wheelchair programme conducted in northern Haiti, beneficiaries and their families were introduced to the study, and 86 of 91 consented to future contact. A survey was developed with input from international and local partners, and administered by face-to-face or telephone interviews. Donated wheelchairs were assessed in 5 categories: wheelchair utilization, maintenance, fit, environmental access, and perceived benefits of wheelchair use. RESULTS: A total of 57 beneficiaries (age range < 2-31 years) were located 6 months after receiving their custom-fit wheelchair and consented to the survey. All respondents still had the wheelchair, 70.2% were using it a minimum of 3-5 days/week, 17.5% were using it < 3 days/week and 12.3% were not using it at all. Primary reasons for not using the wheelchair were that it was broken, uncomfortable, or difficult to transport. The commonly reported benefits were improved mobility, independence, participation and social interaction. CONCLUSION: The majority of people who received customized wheelchairs continued to use their equipment 6 months later, with predominantly beneficial outcomes. In future seating initiatives in low-resource settings, efforts to optimize equipment durability and training of local technicians should be supported and evaluated.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".