Evaluating communication training for paid carers of people with traumatic brain injury

Abstract

Training paid carers has a positive effect on improving conversational interactions with people with TBI in a long-term care facility. These improvements can help to foster increased independence for the person with TBI in the home and community.

INCOG Recommendations for Management of Cognition Following Traumatic Brain Injury, Part IV

“…58 Training comprised a 17-hour program delivered across 8 weeks, with structured, casual conversational interactions between paid carers and people with TBI. Conversations were videotaped pretraining, posttraining, and 6 months after training.…”

“…58 Participants were included if others considered them to have pragmatic communication problems, which included inappropriate behaviors, 57,60,80 below-average facial affect recognition, 79 chronic social difficulty or social isolation, apparent disregard or lack of awareness of social cues or inappropriate social responding, or to have scored at least 2 standard deviations (SDs) below the norms on any emotion perception measures used at pre-and postassessment. 78 Participants were excluded from treatment if they had severe visual or hearing impairments, 76,79 visual neglect, 79 severe aphasia, 57,60,76,79 severe dysarthria, 57 severe cognitive impairments that would preclude participation in training activities, 60 drug and alcohol addiction, 57,58,79 active psychosis, 60 non-English-speaking background, insufficient English to be able to follow instructions and converse with group members, 60 severe amnesia, 57 previous brain injury, 57 or previous or recent psychiatric history. [78][79][80] These exclusion criteria characterize many of our clients and patients and which should be kept in mind when using any of the recommended social communication training methods.…”

Feasibility and initial efficacy of project‐based treatment for people with ABI

“…, , Behn et al . ), with four newly graduated practising SLTs as raters. Inclusion of fewer, more experienced therapists may improve reliability; however, further work to streamline the number of scales may also need to be considered in future.…”

“…Conversation has often been used as an outcome of treatment for people that present with communication impairments (Behn et al . , Togher et al . , Kagan et al .…”

“…Both scales use a nine-point Likert scale ranging from 0 (no participation) to 4 (full participation) with 0.5 intervals. The original version of the MPC have well-established interrater reliability and construct validity (Kagan et al 2004), the adapted measures have excellent interrater and strong intra-rater reliability (Togher et al 2010), and have shown sensitivity to change (Behn et al 2012, Togher et al 2013.…”