Lift chairs, stair lift chairs, motorized wheel chairs, mobility scooters and more - all there to offer increased mobility and access to the disabled.

It recently occurred to me that I have been working in community health care for almost ten years now as a Resident Care Attendant. wow, where has the time gone, eh? I have to admit that my work has really increased my awareness of the issues related to and involving access and mobility for elderly individuals and for those individuals who are physically disabled. Before entering the health care field, I knew that there were many people who were - due to their various personal circumstances - say, confined to a wheelchair, but I did not have much appreciation for the varying degrees of limited, restricted access or disability that people experience and how each individual has to deal with them.

Now, with some years of exposure and experience behind me I have to admit that I can really appreciate these differences in the individual situation. Recently, i have had reason to think over what I have actually learned about the issues of mobility and access and have decide to in a sense codify or unify this knowledge by putting together this site. At one time I knew what wheelchair was but could not adequately describe to you the difference between a wheelchair and a power chair or what a 'power chair' even was; I could not have told you the difference between a wheelchair and a lift chair or a stair lift ( effectively a chair lift for stairs ) and a mechanical lift. And if you asked me the difference between a scooter and a mechanical wheelchair, I would have been challenged to tell you. Well, here is where I hope to present some helpful information on the differences. I figured that one of the best ways to present this information would be to break it up by category, giving each category of mobility aid or device its own area of focus. This way I can give such things as lift chairs, stair lift chairs, mechanical or motorized wheelchairs and scooters appropriate coverage. So with this site I will be able to elaborate on what I have seen with my own eyes; I will be able to reflect on how I have seen various clients go out on the town and far afield in their electric or motorized wheel chairs and be able to attend functions such as Weddings and other social gatherings and feel more a part of their local community because they were not so greatly affected by factors like having to find someone able to physically help move them around or to even help get them to the location of an event: with their power chair, they often are able to transport them self to a location unaided. With the standard home lift chair recliner, I can reflect on how I have seen clients be able to relax at home in their own living rooms and not feel stressed because they now have the capability of getting out of their own recliner without the need for any assistance; without such an accessible chair, they were facing the regular and often urgent concern of needing help to get out of their chair for any time that they needed to use their bathroom. Any discussion on here regarding the variety of stair lift chairs out there would certainly include my observations of how the installation of such devices in the home of someone I have known has meant a huge difference in her ability to access all points of her multi-storied home, something that she was no longer able to do before due to a slow or gradual decrease in her personal mobility. Finally, I will want to include my experiences working with a t least one client who, due to severe decreases in her personal mobility resulting from advanced stage Cerebral Palsy, had until recently found herself much more dependent or reliant on others to get around in the community than she had ever been before - at least that is until she was able to acquire a medical mobility scooter and once again decide for herself how and when she was going to go out and about. These examples and more all come to mind. I will also try to include some mention of the different manufacturers of these vehicles and devices so that references to terms such as Golden lift chairs or Pride lift chairs will have some more relevancy to the reader.

Today, so many life-enhancing mobility aids are available that can greatly improve or enhance the accessibility and mobility of mobility challenged or disabled individuals in the community and I hope that with this site I can reflect this reality. The levels of increased accessibility for the individual and basically an individual's freedom to pretty much just get around today are so much further advanced in the last few decades, that what were once thought of as just 'pipe dreams' for so many of the disabled, have for the most part become a reality for so many people now in similar situations...