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Bridging the gap between the rehabilitation hospital and the community
Brain injury survivors receive psychological services while in acute rehabilitation programs but often are unable to access follow-up support in their local rural communities due to lack of coordination among inpatient and outpatient service providers. To address this need, the University of Missouri School of Medicine's Department of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation, Rusk Rehabilitation Center/Health South, Missouri Telehealth Network and the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research have joined together to bridge the service gap.
Missouri TeleRehabilitation Training Program goals
- Strengthen rural families with brain injury by promoting access to appropriate behavioral health care in rural communities.
- Create a seamless continuum of rehabilitation psychological care from the inpatient to community settings.
- Foster relationships between brain injury survivors and local support resources in the survivors' own communities.
- Use state-of-the-art information technology and video teleconferencing to extend rehabilitation expertise to rural communities.
- Build mutually enhancing partnerships between consumers, rural professionals, and brain injury specialists at the academic medical center.
- Replace the reliance on urban specialists that weakens community health care infrastructure with a permanent rural network of brain injury services that enhances local communities.
TeleRehabilitation training: How it works
- Identify the need: When a TBI survivor who lives in a rural area is in inpatient rehabilitation, we assess the survivor and family's goals and functioning, and generate recommendations for support after the survivor returns home.
- Match the family to a community care provider: During the inpatient stay, a rural mental health provider from the survivor's community is identified and recruited to participate in training.
- Telehealth training: The neuropsychologist meets with the rural mental health provider for several training sessions using state-of-the-art teleconferencing equipment.
- Make the connection: When possible, the survivor and family meet the rural mental health provider over the telehealth network before the survivor returns home from the hospital.
- Return to the community: If the survivor and family need behavioral health services after returning home, there is a trained counselor, social worker, or psychologist in their local rural community to whom they can turn.
Regional brain injury training workshops for mental health professionals
In order to train as many rural mental health providers as possible in the need of persons with brain injury, this project will extend training to larger groups of mental health providers through Missouri regional workshops in the years 2000-2001.
Workshop agenda:
- Disseminate brochures and training manuals to rural mental health providers.
- Panel discussions with brain injury survivors and families.
- Breakout sessions on brain injury-related topics:
- Mood changes
- Behavioral issues
- Problem-solving strategies
- Return to school and work
- Family and caregiver support
List of rural Missouri project participants
More about the telerehabilitation technology
Training is conducted over the two-way audio and video teleconferencing system of the Missouri Telehealth Network (MTN). MTN uses dedicated fiber-optic cable T1 lines to link 22 sites throughout central Missouri to the specialists at the University of Missouri School of Medicine. The training sessions include real-time simultaneous full-motion video and audio between two or more sites on the network.
The neuropsychologist connects from the urban academic rehabilitation hospital at Rusk Rehabilitation Center to any of the MTN sites throughout Missouri. At the remote site, the rural mental health provider links via teleconference with the neuropsychologist. The neuropsychologist and rural mental health provider talk with each other interactively in real time. The participants see each other over full-size television monitors.
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