Article

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a significant concern in the veteran population,
and the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) has devoted substantial healthcare
resources to the rehabilitation of veterans with TBI. Evaluating the outcomes of
these rehabilitation activities requires measuring whether they meaningfully
improve veterans' lives, especially with regard to community and vocational
participation, which are strongly linked to perceived quality of life. In January
2010, the VA Rehabilitation Research and Development Service convened an
invitational conference focused on outcome measurement in rehabilitation with a
specific focus on veterans' community and vocational participation. This article
reports on the working group, addressing the issues of conceptualizing and
operationalizing such participation outcome measures for veterans with TBI; we
discuss conceptual models of participation, review participation subdomains and
their instruments of measurement, and identify current research issues and needs.
Two avenues are identified for advancing participation measurement in veterans
with TBI. First, we describe suggestions to facilitate the immediate
implementation of participation measurement into TBI clinical practice and
rehabilitation (cont) research within the VA healthcare system. Second, we
describe recommendations for future VA research funding initiatives specific to
improving the measurement of participation in veterans with TBI.

Langue : ANGLAIS