Opinion
Clinical psychologist Célia Demarchi has been involved in helping shed light on brain injuries in children. Here, she talks about her recent research into how brain injuries affect this growing demographic, and why it’s important that research continues.
Outcomes following traumatic brain injury (TBI) are difficult to predict and NICE guidelines have emphasised the need for UK-based research into predictors of long-term conditions after brain injury. Advances in medicine mean that more and more young people are surviving catastrophic injuries each year, but this does also mean that we now have a growing number of people with needs that aren’t always being met.
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The admissions team invest a lot of time in developing our contact base of social workers, solicitors, case managers and other professionals who can refer people to our homes. We accept people from across the whole country, so we’ve created a national network over several years. This is enabling us now to reach out to as many people as possible who may need our support. Richardson Care was established over 30 years ago and the provision for adults with acquired brain injury has increased significantly in the last seven years. It has taken some time to build up our network of contacts but our aim is to grow at a sustainable rate.
Goal setting is always a hot topic in neurorehabilitation – it has, in many ways, become much more than the sum of its parts and, as a concept, it is saturated with literature. There is frequently new research evaluating components of goal setting or describing emerging ideas in the field, and this can be difficult to navigate, even with all the time in the world. As clinicians, however, there is rarely ever any spare time at all. If we listen to what we are told about how important goal setting is for our service users and teams, we need to know exactly what it is, why it matters, and how we can do a good job of it.
Factors that likely influence rehabilitation potential and recovery and predictions of the same include previous abilities, age at onset/injury, individuality, drive, underlying motivation, health, support, environment, the exact nature of injury and the exact nature of individual pre-morbid neurology. Other influencers include our understanding of the brain, how it works, how it repairs and how it responds in the short, medium and long term after injury. Alongside our developing but yet still poor understanding of how exactly treatments and therapies work, even where we ‘know’ that they do, it is therefore impossible to pinpoint and prescribe a very exact treatment or approach for a specific individual's neurology, type of insult and likely natural recovery.
You can learn a lot about an organisation in a crisis. In the white light of times like these, organisational problems can be exacerbated and the truth really does come out. Take EasyJet for example. The airline recently asked for a government bailout to get it through the coronavirus crisis. No shame in that – if it hadn’t at the same time signed off a £174m payout to its shareholders. For an organisation that claims to “support” and “empower” its staff, it seems it is directors and not workers who top the priorities list.
