Professional Education

Assisting Hand Assessment Certification Course

Course Outline

The Assisting Hand Assessment (AHA) is a hand function evaluation instrument.  The test was developed for use with children who have a functional limitation in one upper extremity.  It measures and describes how a child uses his/her affected hand (assisting hand) collaboratively with the non-affected hand in bimanual play.  The AHA can be used with children as young as 18 months and up to 12 years of age.

The AHA has the unique perspective of assessing how the child uses his/her two hands together, in a fun and engaging situation where using two hands is natural. It is the child’s spontaneous and normal way of handling objects when playing that is assessed, not their best capacity to grasp, release or manipulate objects when prompted to use their affected hand. This makes the AHA a measure of usual performance.

This 2.5-day training course is the first step in becoming a certified Assisting Hand Assessment rater.  The course teaches the Assisting Hand Assessment (English Research Version 4.3), and includes information about the test construct, testing procedure and scoring practice on a range of children from videos.  A manual with detailed scoring criteria and a computer based scoring form is provided.  The remainder of the certification process is done following the course.  Each participant is required to complete eight calibration cases with satisfactory results.  Five of the cases are distributed at the course and 3 will need to be self-produced AHA play sessions.  The cases are sent to the instructors for individual feedback and for final certification.

Course Instructors
Lena Krumlinde-Sundholm, OT PhD, is an Occupational Therapist and a researcher at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.  She completed a PhD in Pediatric Neuroscience in 2002 with the thesis 'Aspects of hand function in children with unilateral impairments'.  She has been involved in the development of the Manual Ability Classification System (MACS) and the Assisting Hand Assessment.  She teaches the AHA course and clinical applications of motor learning regionally and internationally.  In addition to her research and teaching, Lena works in pediatric practice with OTs in the Stockholm region.

Marie Holmefur, OT, MSc has been working with children with disabilities, with adults with learning disabilities and in Occupational Therapy Education since 1993.  Marie is currently a doctoral student at the Health Care Sciences Postgraduate School at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.  Her dissertation encompasses the development of the AHA as well as studying longitudinal assisting hand development in children with hemiplegic cerebral palsy.

For more information on the AHA please visit www.ahanetwork.se

Contact:
Donna Sobers
Bloorview Kids Rehab
150 Kilgour Road   
Toronto, ON M4G 1R8   

Phone:  416-424-3851 
Fax:  416- 425-6591
Toll Free:  1-800-363-2440 Extension 3851

E-mail: learningevents at bloorview dot ca *(see Note below)

Note: Copy the above e-mail address into the To field of your e-mail message and reconstruct the e-mail address by removing the spaces and replacing the “at” and “dot” with the proper symbols (@ and .) respectively.

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