Head Injury - recovery and the longer term effects

As the Acquired Head Injury person emerges from initial period of unconsciousness or altered awareness, more obvious physical, cognitive and potentially behavioural problems can be observed as we would call the longer term effects.

There is a possibility these problems will resolve fully or partially with or without rehabilitation.

It is often difficult to predict exactly how fast and how much recovery will be observed, and how functional post brain injury person will be able to function in the community.

We divides long term effects of Brain injury in to physical (problems with movement and sensory abilities such as vision, touch or taste), cognitive problems (thinking processes such as ability to concentrate, short and long term memory, etc.) and behaviour (motivation, self-control, etc.).

Physical Problems

Our brains are in charge of movement of our body, coordinating movement of our legs and arms, to make them smooth and graceful and also integrating movements into skilled patterns, like sit to stand, eating, writing etc. The right hand side of the brain is responsible for movement in the left hand side of the body and vice versa. Depends on the part of the brain injury, often movement in one side of the body may be more affected than the other as one side of the brain may be more severely injured.

Degree of the brain injury can vary from severe to mild and in most of the cases is individual – affected person might need to use a wheelchair as the loss of control over movement can be detrimental. Some of the people lose control on facial and throat muscles what directly affect talking or swallowing. Others might struggle with feeding or dressing themselves. For many brain injury survivors these physical problems resolve quite quickly during the initial phase of recovery for the others might take substantially longer or they might never fully recover.

Cognitive problems

Cognitive problems such as thinking, remembering, speaking, calculating, concentrating, and behavioural difficulties with initiating, monitoring and regulating behaviour can we very common with brain injuries.

The above changes and many more, taken together may mean that from the point of view of the family it feels as if the person is now very different from the person they knew before. Working as a one team with family, health and allied health professionals, formulating clear SMART goals and effective execution of the plan helps to put brain injury survivor on the path of recovery.

Rehabilitation Support Physiotherapy offer multilingual community based physiotherapy and rehabilitation programme to help people recover social independence following a brain injury.

Our service is designed to meet the needs of people at later stages of rehabilitation concentrating on physical and cognitive rehabilitation. We start from assessment to comprehensive rehabilitation programme. Our person centred, long-term support is tailored to the current needs based on latest recommendations for neurological rehabilitation.