Importance of Early Rehabilitation for Brain Injury Survivors
Pursuing a personal injury claim can be an incredibly daunting prospect for someone who finds themselves having suffered from a traumatic brain injury. It is our role as personal injury solicitors to ensure that the process of pursuing a claim for your injuries is manageable, transparent and focused on the immediate needs of you, the injured person, and your family.
Often brain injury survivors’ lives and their families’ lives are turned upside down, and the most prevalent concern in the immediate aftermath is ensuring that emergency medical treatment is accessed and that the injuries and symptoms are managed as much as possible. It is not unusual, further down the line following an accident that brain injury survivors and their families begin to feel able to even think about pursuing a potential personal injury claim.
What people don’t always realise, although hugely understandable in the circumstances, is that instructing a specialised personal injury solicitor as early as possible, means that we are able to advocate on the injured party’s behalf to address their immediate needs at a crucial time when medical intervention and treatment can have the most beneficial effect.
Treatment for Brain Injuries
Are NHS services fit for purpose for those who have suffered a traumatic brain injury?
Following a traumatic brain injury most victims will find themselves being cared for by the NHS.
The NHS can provide fantastic care to people that find themselves suffering from a brain injury. A vital part of that care is the rehabilitation required to help ensure that injured people begin to regain some independence and restore some normality to their lives. However, as with all public services there is a limit as to how far the NHS can go in providing these services and unfortunately due to funding limits and disparities in facilities it can often be a post-code lottery as to what is available.
Compensation
When you have been injured and someone else is to blame you have a right to make a claim for compensation for your injuries and any financial losses you may have suffered following your accident or are likely to suffer in the future.
At Bolt Burdon Kemp, when we take on a claim on behalf of a person who has suffered a traumatic brain injury, we understand the need to secure early interim payments and private rehabilitation to supplement or take the place of the care already provided by the NHS.
Interim payments may be secured for you throughout the lifetime of a claim from the party at fault prior to the final settlement of your claim. This can ease the financial pressure if you have been unable to work following the accident, are paying for private treatments or therapies or need to make adaptations to your home or purchase specialist equipment to aid your recovery.
Why rehab? – Get in early!
We aim to secure funding from the party at fault to put a programme of rehabilitation in place as early as possible following your accident.
Early intensive rehabilitation with specialist programmes has been clinically proven to be the most effective way in which to improve an individual’s functional ability, independence, social integration, and emotional well-being.
I recently attended a seminar organised by the United Kingdom Acquired Brain Injury Forum (UKABIF). Part of the seminar focused on rehabilitation for brain injury survivors. Various experts from different fields offered insight into their perspectives on the value of rehabilitation for survivors of traumatic brain injury. It was clear that in order to get the best for survivors of brain injury an interdisciplinary approach is required.
Finding the right services for you
Identifying the needs of each of our clients and the most suitable rehabilitation provider is dependent on the individual and the injuries they have suffered. At Bolt Burdon Kemp we can nominate a case manager who specialises in managing rehabilitation for brain injury survivors and will be experienced to manage the course of your rehabilitation and liaise with providers to ensure that you receive a co-ordinated and structured programme of rehabilitation built around your individual needs.
Where your rehabilitation is being provided by a range of experts across multiple disciplines it is vital that there is collaboration and frequent reassessments to establish how things are progressing. A good case manager will facilitate this collaboration and feed back to your solicitor so as to ensure that further payments or authority is secured from the party at fault to continue your treatment.
The Ultimate Goal
Having brain injury survivors return home with their friends and family, depending on the severity of the injury, with a degree of independence and self-confidence is something that rehabilitation will hopefully eventually lead to. Rehabilitation seeks to make sure that brain injury survivors reach their optimum level of recovery and maximum quality of life.
Specialist Brain Injury Solicitors
Our personal injury team at Bolt Burdon Kemp specialise in brain injury cases, helping people who have suffered traumatic accidents. We have developed close working relationships with private rehabilitation providers and charities such as Headway and UKABIF for our work with brain injury survivors and we are constantly working to provide the best possible results for our clients, to enable them to live fulfilled lives as much as possible.