Writing Good-Quality Assistive Technology Assessment Reports

The study reported in this paper developed criteria and guidelines for writing up a good-quality AT Assessment Report - a document which is often required to activate an assistive technology intervention for an individual client. The Report should provide precise recommendations about the assistive solutions that best meet the client's needs, explain the underlying reasoning, provide evidence of appropriateness for the funding agency and set the baseline for later measurement of the outcomes of the intervention. Within this study, forty-eight clients with severe disability conditions were recruited in nine rehabilitation Centers in various regions of Italy. They were assessed for assistive solutions by their rehabilitation teams according to a common protocol; assessment Reports were produced for each client according to the same template, and individual AT interventions were activated following the recommendations. Then the Reports underwent a blind peer-review exercise involving over fifty professionals, who evaluated their quality against ten criteria; based on the findings, the template of the AT Assessment Report was revised and good-practice guidelines were inferred for the contents of each field. Now the final version is freely downloadable and is being used routinely in the Centers that participated in the study.