WCA based on mobility

igglypop93

I have my phone appt Tuesday and while i think I've thought through most of what I need to i just wanted to see if anyone had done a phone assessment for mobility based issues.

I'm going to ask my mum to take some measurements of bits of the house so I can give better estimates of how far I can walk and areas of the house that I can't get to etc. I can't use a self propel wheelchair, partly due to sitting being one of the most difficult options for me but also due to the motion needed to propel the wheels ( mix of restrictions in leaning forward like that repetitively due to hip and also some more minor limitations due to osteo in my fingers/wrists.


The other part I'm worried about is to use the phone I have to prop myself up slightly and it aggravates my hip pretty quickly which makes calls longer than 5-10mins  tricky and I didn't know what to do if it gets too bad and I need to reposition? It'll still be bad but sometimes I can get a few more minutes on a call by moving into a slightly different position but I have to move the phone away while I do it so was wondering if this would be OK if i tell them beforehand?


Last question. I use a pillow phone stand (it's been such a help, company called "saiji" if you search on amazon saiji phone stand it'll come up) as I have to lie on my side and it's made my day to day better because i was using a wallet case to prop it up beforehand on my duvet and that really wasn't working. And my meds changed maybe a day before we sent the forms in so we didn't have any idea whether they'd improve things long term when we wrote the form etc. Luckily they've made the pain both less intense and more consistent, so instead of having fluctuations from both short lasting meds running out and me moving in ways that made my hip react or having falls etc, now I just have the variations due to purely my hip reacting to different movements or falls.

Changes like the ones I've mentioned haven't made a big impact on my mobility but they have improved my quality of life. I know you're supposed to just focus on how you were at the time of the assessment but because my mobility is still near enough the same I wasn't sure if I was OK to explain that we had only recently started the new meds when I sent the form in and that while my mobility is still just as limited the pain is better controlled outside of extra incidents (e.g falls or dodgy movements).


Sorry for the long post, may be slow responding as holding myself up to type generally aggravates it for a little while so may have to wait a bit to respond, just going to have to see what it does.

Thanks for any general advice re phone assessments related to mobility too. Thank you. 

calcotti

Can you not just put the phone on speaker phone and put it down on a table or desk close to you to avoid having to hold it.

igglypop93

When i put it on speaker it ends up with them not hearing me. I can hear them fine but for some reason the speaker phone doesn't transmit my voice well, apparently its muffled? Whereas on normal calls its not. I don't really get how that works as its all the same microphone I think. 

L_Volunteer

Is this a house phone @igglypop93 or a mobile phone? Unfortunately, the approach will differ depending on what type of phone you are using. 

If a mobile phone, what I do is put my earphones in my phone (that have an inbuilt microphone) and speak through the earphones.

This means I can put the phone on the desk and be heard clearly. Though, this will also depend if you have earphones with a microphone available, of course 

igglypop93

That's a great idea I'm going to test it today and see if it works, thank you!!