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Case Series Illustrating the Use of Consistent Rehabilitation Outcome Measures in Traumatic Brain Injury

Jan Perkins, Ksenia I Ustinova and Chris Hausbeck

Despite the prevalence of persons with traumatic brain injury (TBI), there is limited research evidence on rehabilitation outcomes for this population or therapy efficacy, making it difficult to document overall program outcomes. This may in part be due to the heterogeneity of the condition presentation, therapist and center treatment variability, and the expert recommendations for multidisciplinary care which complicates research design. A different approach may be to accept the heterogeneity of the population and gather consistent outcome data. A set of consistent measures used across the population may allow individual clinicians, managers and researchers to track therapy efficacy and over time improve management of this unique client population. This case series reports on the first three clients seen in one outpatient rehabilitation clinic where a consistent set of simple but clinically relevant physical rehabilitation outcome measures were added to therapy at evaluation and after every ten subsequent sessions. Measures selected were chosen to document key movement impairments and quality of life issues after TBI, yet be simple enough for use in routine clinical practice. Despite the considerable variation in client presentation (time since injury, age, clinical presentation) these measures were able to track improvement for each client. It is proposed that clinicians develop a standard battery of easily administered, functionally relevant outcome measures that can be used to study the effects of individualized therapies on this diverse population.