i) Impact on daily living skills

Injury to a particular part of the brain can cause a person to have difficulty performing one or more of the skills they require for daily living activities.

Below is a list of common ways that skills required for daily living activities are affected by traumatic brain injury:

• Memory – difficulty remembering events, appointments, names, requests, telephone numbers, messages. i.e. not remembering home phone number.

• Planning and organising – difficulty planning activities, organising work areas, coordinating tasks or appointments and getting ready “on time”. i.e. always being late to appointments.

• Attention/Concentration – difficulty maintaining focus on tasks and completing tasks. i.e. not monitoring items cooking on stove.

• Physical abilities – muscle weakness and/or loss of coordination (arms, legs, trunk, head), spasticity/tone/contracture,  difficulty walking and transferring. i.e. needs a wheelchair for mobility.

• Communication – may have slurred speech, word finding difficulties, decreased ability to understand words or express themselves appropriately. i.e. not able to ask for items or assistance when shopping.
• Energy  - difficulty maintaining energy levels to complete tasks i.e. unable to walk distance to local shopping centre.
• Motivation – difficulty identifying and completing relevant tasks due to lack of interest or enthusiasm for the task. i.e. refusing to shower daily.

• Self monitoring – difficulty recognising when they are making mistakes or are inappropriate in their behaviour. i.e. repetitively doing the same task incorrectly.

• Behaviour management – difficulty monitoring/controlling their own behaviour including anger, inappropriate conversation and/or offensive behaviour. i.e. yelling at random people in shopping centre for no reason.

• Problem solving – difficulty identifying there is a problem and determining the best solution. i.e. catching wrong train and not getting off to try to find the correct train.

ii) Gabrielle has a TBI (11 mins)

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