Training therapists in traumatic brain injury vocational rehabilitation

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Therapists often share good practice and want to improve what their service-users receive in rehabilitation. When they come across an intervention that gets good results, therapists are keen to learn how to be able to implement the same in their own hospital or other context. However, what we learned is that transferring what one therapist does to another therapist is not straightforward. Developing this training package took a significant amount of time and energy to really record all the elements and steps. This is because once we get used to delivering an intervention, aspects of it become second nature and it becomes difficult to describe everything in detail. However, this detail is what is required for the new therapist to learn and then implement the intervention. The detail is fundamental to be able to then design the modes of training. The paper describes this process and the package of training that the therapists then received. The key aspect of the training package were the three components together; the manual, the teaching and the mentoring. Therapists said all three elements were required and that ongoing support from mentoring really helped them to get to grips with the intervention itself but more importantly, to implement it in a real life situation. The therapists are able to recommend improvements for future colleagues who might also receive version 2 of the training package.

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