Vendor Review: Care Medical Equipment

[pearlieq]

We just returned from a 4 night trip to WDW with my mother, who has lost the use of her right leg due to metastatic cancer. She normally uses a power wheelchair at home, but she was worried about having her powerchair gate checked at the airport since we've heard many cautionary tales about chairs being damaged in flight.

We decided to use her transport chair at the airport and then rent a power wheelchair once we got to WDW. I called several companies, including Walker, Randy's, and Buena Vista Scooters, but the only ones who offered a large, heavy-duty power chair for rental was Care Medical.

I booked the chair over the phone and arranged to have it delivered to POFQ on the day of our arrival. I was quoted a price of $65/day. The chair was a Jazzy Quantum 1400 (or 1420, my memory fails me) with a 22" seat and a heavy-duty weight capacity.

We arrived a POFQ and the chair was at bell services when we arrived, just as promised. I was initially a bit underwhelmed with the chair. I had called ahead and asked if it had a push-type seat (like a regular wheelchair) or a van-style seat (like on a scooter) and I was told it had a push-type seat. We were happy to hear this, because it's easy to use the handles on a push-type seat to rig up a walker holder, since Care Medical didn't have a walker holder for the chair.

Unfortunately, the chair was not push-type, it was van-style. I don't understand why there would be any confusion or mis-information on that type of question, especially with a business that deals in wheelchairs all the time.

I was also a bit disappointed with the condition of the chair. It was either rather old or very heavily used. The upholstery and cushion were tired looking, and there were tons of marks all over the chair and arms. I'm sure the chair gets a lot of use and rough handling, but I felt that $65/day is a premium price for a rental chair and I was expecting a nicer chair.

It is also worth noting that you never actually see the person from the rental company and the chair doesn't come with a manual or any instructions, so we had to do some experimenting to figure out things that weren't intuitive. It took both my husband and I crawling around on the floor inspecting the bottom of the chair to find that the power cord is stored in a compartment in the base of the chair. Also, we couldn't figure out how to adjust the speed for the first couple of days. DH finally discovered that it was adjusted by hitting a "Mode" button and then using the joystick to adjust it up and down. A little card with basic instructions would have much appreciated!

My mom was reasonably happy with the chair. It was comfortable and had adequate space. The steering was a bit jerkier than her chair at home, but she was able to drive it quite well. Since my mother was pretty worn out from traveling, we didn't do much that day except unpack and get dinner. We did notice that right before she went to bed, the chair was showing that it already had lost 2 bars of power. We were suprised at that, since she hadn't done much at all, but just figured that it must be a power-hog and that we would have to be vigilant about charging it up.

The next day we got a late start. My started using the chair to get around her room at about 9:00am, and we headed to EPCOT around 10:30. We had a very quiet morning, but unfortunately, we noticed the chair was showing that it was almost out of power at 1:30pm! We found a spot to charge it and sat for about an hour. Sadly, that didn't really help. The power meter kept jumping all over the place and it starting flashing indicating it didn't have any power, even though it had been off or charging most of the afternoon.

We called Care Medical, and to their credit, we were able to reach someone right away. They arranged for the man in charge of the chairs to call us, but the net result of the conversation was that nothing could be done until morning (this was about 6:30pm). We had already wasted about half a day waiting on the chair to charge, stopping to conserve power, etc. Now we were stuck in the back of EPCOT with a chair that said it had no power. We were really worried! Mercifully we were able to make it out of the park and back to the hotel, but we lost our whole evening because of the chair problems.

We called Care Medical back in the morning and they said they could have someone out to work on the chair by 10:30am. There went the morning. We had initially thought that we would try to go a park with mom in the transport chair, so Care Medical said we could leave the chair at Bell Services. However, mom was having a rough morning, so we opted to wait at the resort for the repair tech. As it turned out, the repair tech figured that since we were going to go to the park, they could slate our repair in for later, so they didn't arrive until 11:45 to fix the chair. It took them about half an hour to swap out the batteries for a fresh set, and they said they'd give us a credit for one day's rental for our troubles.

After the batteries were replaced, the chair worked just fine and we were able to take it around the resort and parks with no power issues. We returned it to Bell Services on our last day, and we were issued our refund promptly.

All in all, I was satisfied with our experience with Care Medical. I wasn't wowed, but it was adequate. We were always able to get hold of them, which I appreciated, but I thought the rental charge was high, especially for the condition of the chair, and I wish we hadn't had to lose so much time dealing with bad batteries.

I hope this helps anyone who might be considering renting from Care Medical. I'm happy to answer any questions.

 

[SueM in MN]

Thanks for the report and sorry to hear you had kind of a rough time.
Not many people rent power wheelchairs (you basically have to use one at home to have anyone agree to rent one to you).

A couple of years ago, we had called Care to ask about renting a power wheelchair for DD. They did ask about the settings on her wheelchair (the settings being not the same as your mom's chair was probably why it was so jerky). As it turned out, Care did not have one that would fit DD and would not have been able to accomodate her special needs for foot straps and a seat belt.
It is too bad they did not do a better job meeting your mother's needs. Since there are few places renting power wheelchairs and most people who need one can't easily use something else, it's disappointing to hear they did not do a better job.