Acquired brain injury reaches epidemic scale

ACQUIRED brain injury (ABI) has become Ireland’s hidden epidemic because survivors cannot seek the services they need and their families are too exhausted to come forward, Barbara O’Connell, chief executive of the Peter Bradley Foundation, claimed yesterday.

Every year about 10,000 people sustain a head injury in Ireland and lead a dramatically altered life afterwards.

Accessing appropriate rehabilitation can prove hugely difficult for ABI survivors and, because of the severity of their injury, returning to work or family life is often impossible.

Ms O’Connell said there was a need for a specialist service response to people with ABI because existing disability services were unsuitable. “A lot of them are either inappropriately placed in nursing homes, psychiatric hospitals or at home with families who cannot cope.”

Ms O’Connell, who spoke at a conference on the challenges and opportunities of rehabilitating after ABI in Trim, Co Meath, said survivors did not see themselves as disabled and wanted to return to the life before they sustained the brain injury. “These people need assistance with the challenges they have that made them different as a result of their accident,” she said.

People with a brain injury sometimes think they are fine and do not look for the services they need. “They only way you can recognise them is by their family who are collapsing with exhaustion.”

Ms O’Connell said people with ABI could live a very good quality of life, if they get the specialist support they need. “The trick is knowing the different services they need at different times of their life.”

Ms O’Connell said the Peter Bradley Foundation was established in 2000 to provide a range of pioneering, flexible and tailor-made services for people with ABI.

“Many people with an ABI have gone back to work, but what they find is they are more fatigued and are not able to be as productive as they were and they need help to know that they are not losing their mind — it is a result of their brain injury.”

Ms O’Connell, who trained as an occupational therapist and worked in the National Rehabilitation Hospital in Dublin for seven years, said her brother Peter Bradley suffered a ABI following a motor accident. Because there was no suitable place for her brother, he ended up in a locked unit in a nursing home when he was 42 years old, despite being capable of living at home if the specialist support he needed was provided.

Ms O’Connell said her family decided to set up a new service supported by the Health Service Executive that allowed Peter and three others to live together in his house, which he gave to the foundation. “Within about two months he was off down to the shops by himself; he was then off to town by himself. It was that dramatic, because the proper supports were provided.”

The foundation has 14 “assisted living” residences and hopes to open a further two by the end of the year. It also provides community-based rehabilitation services.

The conference was co-hosted by Brí, a brain injury advocacy group that also seeks to influence the development of specialist rehabilitation services for people with brain injuries.