ASSBI Conference

This week I will be attending the Australian Society for the Study of Brain Injury (ASSBI) Conference in Brisbane.

This years conference is titled Ecological Practice: Assessment and Rehabilitation and has some well known speakers (namely Catherine Mateer - Canada, Eli Vakil - Israel, Brigette Larkins - New Zealand, Mary P Galea - Melbourne and Leanne Togher - Sydney) and topics (such as Beyond trial and error: Theory-driven methods of memory assessment and remediation, and Everyday functioning through the lens of awareness and executive control.

I am sure I will gain a lot of useful information on cognitive deficits post brain injury and rehabilitation techniques from this course and look forward to using this blog site to present some of my reflections on the information presented and knowledge gained! Stay tuned……….

Post traumatic Amnesia

PTA - A common theme in brain injury rehabilitation and first port of call for occuaptional therapy assessment and intervention following admission to the rehabilitation ward I work on. For years we have used the Westmead PTA Scale to assess and monitor the duration of PTA for patients following a traumatic brain injury. Recently the use of this assessment and associated protocols have been brought into question by a Consultant reasonably new to the rehabilitation service and in trying to locate research in order to support our practice and ensure best practices I have hit a bit of a rut! There appears to be very limited research or literature on the use of this assessment and recommendations or protocols for patients while they are in PTA. Issues we are experiencing in particular are the push for us to beginning assessing patients who are borderline PTA i.e 11/12 or 12/12 and allowing weekend leave or community visits for patients in PTA. The PTA Protocol book addresses (see link) both these issues and advises against them (as we are currently doing) however to have documented research, evidence or literature regarding these restrictions would be ideal and provide us with a bit more ‘clout’ when arguing (or politely discussing!) our case. I will continue searching and keep you posted but any thoughts or information would be greatly appreciated!

Setting up

well…..several hours later I have finally managed to add some blog links. I have never thought myself as computer illiterate but this has certainly had its challenges! hehe I even had to resort to changing my theme as I couldn’t work out how to display the links on the old one and this one did it automatically! (I’m sure there was some simple way around this problem however I decided not to waste any more time attempting to find it!)

As you may have noticed my blogroll consists of a few blog sites relating to my areas of interest (occupational therapy and traumatic brain injury) however I must say despite a few hours of searching there is not enough information out there on either let alone the two combined!). Therein lies the reason for the research project……lets get our voice out there!

The search will continue…………………….