Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is the first cause of long-term disability among young children and adults. TBI has a number of consequences on the child’s independence, functioning, and subsequent development in a number of domains. On the physical level, if significant neurological deficits persist, some children do not regain walking or independence for basic activities of daily living. Regarding cognitive deficits, they are very frequent initially, and can worsen over time, as children “grow into their deficits” and do not make age expected progress. Frequent cognitive impairments comprise memory and attention deficits, executive functioning and, problem solving deficits).Children also often suffer language, communication, emotional and behavioural deficits (e.g. difficulty understanding demands, messages or to be understood by others, difficulty regulating and adapting behaviour, difficulty expressing emotions, affections, sufferings regarding the deficits that the child becomes aware of and his comparison with pre-injury ability and with their siblings and peers). In the most severe cases, the recovery process of self care skills and personal hygiene and gait, the recovery of cognitive abilities is difficult, sometimes requiring long periods of hospitalization with intensive multidisciplinary rehabilitation. Besides all the medical issues, families face emotional problems that they can't manage without specialists help, sometimes specialist care is not available close to their home and they need to find accommodation near the hospital, they struggle in accessing psychological support for family and children. Frequent, often unpredictable deficits resulting from a traumatic brain injury, various long-term consequences and needs, to overcome his/her condition, determine the specialists to meet and work together in a unitary, multidisciplinary team that permanently searches for specialized adapted approaches to address the various deficits arising from this challenging condition. The objectives of the project are: - to improve the competences of specialists who are involved in the rehabilitation of children with TBI - to improve the medical practice by transferring good practice models of medical recovery and rehabilitation, in order to increase the quality of various therapies for the benefit of the children with traumatic brain injury - to raise awareness about the issue of this condition that, in addition to the immediate deficits, leads to long-standing (lifelong) deficits, and requires very long term follow-up and care - to increase the visibility of our institution as one that can provide quality, professionally tailored services - to stimulate development of common projects, collaboration and future exchanges between teams . In order to achieve what we have proposed, we will have 4 transnational project meetings in participating countries, 3 short term learning activities in Romania, France, and Italy, 3 dissemination of the knowledge gained in these activities. This project has a direct target group consisting of neurologist, PRM, psychologists, speech and language therapists, psychomotricians, physical therapists, occupational therapists who represent the specialists involved in offering assessment and therapy to children with TBI from participant organizations (10 participants for each participating organization). The project also addresses all those who contribute to the care of the child who suffered a TBI (hospital specialists, specialists from related organizations, family, school, community) . They are participants for the indirect target group.We estimate that over 200 participants will benefit from the knowledge and experience accumulated by direct target group in learning activities. It is expected that the ongoing project will contribute positively to the implementation of local, regional and national standards of care related to both the principles of sustainable development as well as equal chances for children from different countries. It is also expected that the project will contribute to the increasing of the quality of the therapeutic practice for the specialists in participant institution and other institutions from local rehabilitation network. It is estimated that the daily activities taken by both the participants and the institutions involved, using the results of the project, in the long term will have positive impact on improving the quality of life of children, family and communities where they live, on their integration and involvement in social life. At a European level, the project will contribute to the promotion of modern and international models connected with improvement of practices and will offer opportunity for connections and collaboration between institutions from different EU Member States.
At the end of the project we wanted to: - improve the competences of specialists who are involved in the rehabilitation of children with TBI; - improve the medical practice by transferring good practice models of medical recovery and rehabilitation, in order to increase the quality of various therapies for the benefit of the children with traumatic brain injury; - raise awareness about the issue of this condition that, in addition to the immediate deficits, leads to long-standing (lifelong) deficits, and requires very long-term follow-up and care; - increase the visibility of our institutions as ones that can provide quality, professionally tailored services; - stimulate development of common projects, collaboration and future exchanges between teams.
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) - a chronic health condition, the first cause of mortality and long-term disability among children. Several sequelae occur after a TBI (physical, cognitive, language, communication, emotional and behavioral deficits). Treatments are complex, lifelong, expensive, decreasing the quality of life of patients and caregivers. Therefore, there is a growing need to improve the rehabilitation strategies applied to this clinical population. Sharing knowledge among professionals is one of the best ways to improve the practice. So, we wanted to enhance exchanges between TBI specialists from different countries, to find how the partners work, how their public health system is organised, which are the different cultural approaches of healthcare, how care is provided to patients with TBI, what kind of rehabilitation methods/equipment they use and how are used, how are the children/ families integrated in the rehabilitation care in the partners countries. We also wished to develop an international network, to share experience / ways of working with TBI patients and open perspectives of new approaches, especially the use of advanced high technology devices, simultaneously with partners of other European countries.