Burt and Ernie exposed. This may upset some of you.
Many Fingers in Many Pies.
This is largely a place for the rants, raves, musings and comments on life from Will Wade. You are welcome to peruse at your leisure. Some of it may be interesting to OT folk, some web folk, heck perhaps photography folk if I get round to taking some pics. I have many pies (and actually only 10 fingers) so its a broad church here.
Read more about me here
It’s International Monkey Day. To celebrate:
A South African monkey was once awarded a medal and promoted to the rank of corporal during World War I. (Source)
A card from me to me for my 18th birthday. Says everything.
If you are looking for a big key, keyboard look no further.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
“and the second I finish I’m going to my bosses office and I’m going to tell that M*** F*** to go F*** himself. See, I want to go do something that MATTERS! I’m going back to school and I’m becoming an OCCUPATIONAL THERAPIST! I wanna do something important. Just like you.”
[PAUSE]
” An Occupational Therapist??? Do I look like I wanna marry a f*** Occupational THERAPIST?”
From Bad Teacher starring Cameron Diaz.
PIPs for AAC users
Driving home from CM yesterday I listened to In Touch on Radio 4 which was discussing PIPs; Personal Independent Payments - the replacement to the disability living allowance that the government have been working on for some time. Thought it was worth sharing re: the AAC aspects of the PIPs..
In order to qualify for any component of PIP you will have to score a certain number of points in relation to certain activities. Points are awarded on the basis of your limitations with respect to each activity. The choice of which descriptor applies will be based on consideration of a 12 month period. If you cannot carry out the descriptor for an activity for more than 6 months, aggregated over the 12 month period, you will be awarded the appropriate points.
It all seems fair from an AAC perspective – one of the activities is ”communicating with others” is rated the highest scoring out of all them. In this there are 9 levels – the point system working steadily upwards from “can communicate unaided” (nil points) to “ Cannot, even with communication support, convey a basic need by either verbal or non–verbal means” (9 points). The concern from the RNIB is that a white cane or a guide dog isn’t seen as an aid for the blind (sidenote: if you thought eye gaze was expensive a Guide dog comes in at £48K and you need approx 8 in your lifetime). I guess from an AAC perspective this could be argued that a paper system may be seen as “unaided” but I struggle see it getting to that stage.. See about half way down the page: http://www.disabilityalliance.org/f60.htm
Note “communication support” is defined as “(a) support from a person trained to communicate with people with limited communication abilities: or (b) use of an aid or appliance.”
Maybe it will lead to a greater range of referrals to AAC services for adults as individuals get themselves reassessed to get an “aid” and to get it tested for usage over a period of time. Time will tell.
