Method of classifying

In instances where impairments may be training responsive or an impairment profile does not exactly fit a class, assessment of impairment alone will not be sufficient to allocate a class. This is not to say that assessment of impairment is not necessary – thorough assessment of impairment is essential in order to make sense of the subsequent activity tests.

However, in addition to impairment tests, assessment of novel physical activities can be used to provide the classification team with an indication of the impact of an athlete’s impairments on movement, independent of training. Performance on these tests can be compared with performance of physical activities which are integral to training for the sport – so called, sports-specific tests.

Athletes who are very well trained would be expected to perform better on sports-specific physical tests than they would on novel physical activities, while athletes who are not well trained would have relatively little difference between sports-specific and novel physical tests, because all tests will be essentially novel. Additionally, both novel and practiced physical activities provide classifiers with an overall impression of how the various components of impairment combine to affect movement.

Assessment of training history and other personal factors help in the assessment of how well trained an athlete is. Used in this way, these various methods of assessment can assist classifiers ensure that athletes are placed in the correct class, whether they are well trained are not.

At later stage in the course we will come back to the complexity of ‘difficult cases’.