BMJ  2006;332:118 (14 January), doi:10.1136/bmj.332.7533.118-a

Letter

Deficiencies in rehabilitation after traumatic brain injury

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Editor—Fleminger and Ponsford in their editorial on long term outcome after traumatic brain injury highlight the need for more attention to be paid to neuropsychiatric functioning.1 The authors say that early assessments after injury concentrate more on physical disability than cognition.

Our experience is that neither is tackled adequately. In 2000 we set up the Eastern Region Head Injury Study Group to quantify the requirements of patients with traumatic brain injury. This has identified major deficiencies in the rehabilitation of these patients with absolutely no provision for rapid assess rehabilitation in the east of England.2 The tendency for patients being left to languish on general medical, surgical, and orthopaedic wards continues to their detriment and to the detriment of those requiring admission to acute district general hospital beds. In a six month period, 37 patients with major head injury were transferred back from the regional neurosurgical unit to inappropriate district . . . [Full text of this article]

Peter J Hutchinson, senior academy fellow

Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Cambridge, Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge CB2 2QQ pjah2@cam.ac.uk

John D Pickard, professor of neurosurgery

Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Cambridge, Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge CB2 2QQ


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