How mobility officers assess need for mobility training

Little is known about how Mobility Officers (O&M specialists) assess the training needs of visually impaired clients. In principle, these assessments may be based on estimates of existing travel skills, and the visual and psychological status of clients. In this study, the priority-for-training ratings made when residents arrived at a residential rehabilitation centre were correlated with measures of clients' feelings when travelling, and with visual status. The feelings checklist contained twenty-one items which clients themselves identified as describing how they felt on a journey. Priority for training was related to six of these feelings, which together accounted for 60.24% of the variance of training priorities. These data suggest that Mobility Officers do respond to how their clients are feeling when assessing their need for training. Clinical measures of visual status, surprisingly, were not directly involved in the assessments. However, lower peripheral field status, which could not have been known to Mobility Officers, was significantly correlated with assessments, accounting for a further 15.57% of the variance of priorities; in total, therefore, 75.81% of the variance of assessments were accounted for by the combination of psychological factors, and this visual factor. It is suggested that the latter correlation was due to the effects of an intervening variable. This may have been some aspect of mobility performance, which depends particularly on lower peripheral visual information for its execution.