A clinician's guide to self-awareness training: a continuing education course

Abstract

Impairments in capacity to accurately perceive one’s self following a traumatic brain injury (TBI) poses serious consequences for not only the individuals who experience these deficits, but also their family members and social supports, treating clinicians, and all levels of the healthcare continuum including rehabilitation institutions and insurers. Individuals with limited understanding of their deficits often take longer to complete the rehabilitation process due to poor motivation, reduced effort, persistence and commitment when faced with repeated task failure. For these reasons, individuals with a TBI resulting in executive dysfunction often require increased support and assistance in daily life long-term. The aim of this project, A Clinician’s Guide to Self-Awareness Training, is to provide occupational therapists working in TBI rehabilitation with an eight-hour continuing education course that will equip them with tools that utilize the existing evidence literature to develop treatments that are conducive to the current state of healthcare and are effective. Such treatments include: detailed behavioral analysis, design of a tailored intervention for a specific target behavior, collection of data, and frequent reassessment throughout treatment phases to monitor effectiveness. A Clinician’s Guide to Self-Awareness Training will focus on strategies to facilitate gains in self-awareness during rehabilitation through attention to key factors such as constructive feedback and structured experiences that seek to promote a sense of understanding, control, and confidence while helping to progressively restructure self-evaluative beliefs about functional capabilities (Barco et al., 1991; Langer & Padrone, 1992; Mateer, 1999).