Most stays in an acute rehab facitily are too short for people with brain injury. Familes need to make each day count and look ahead to next steps.
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My name is Marilyn Spivack, and I work at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital
in Boston, Massachusetts.
What I usually do with the family as soon as they come in
is to help the family learn how to be a member of the team.
The length of stay in an acute rehabilitation hospital is much too short.
If they're lucky to get into an acute rehabilitation hospital with a good brain injury program,
every day is a day of extraordinary value.
They cannot waste their time.
They need to learn, they need to participate,
they need to take advantage of every resource that the facility could provide.
It's their time to do their search for the next steps.
I advise families that we need to begin to think about discharge
about a week after their admission
because rehabilitation and recovery do not end
when you walk out of the doors of any rehabilitation hospital in America.
It's the beginning. It's the beginning of a very, very difficult journey.
Produced by Krystal Klingenberg, Justin Rhodes, and Jared Schaubert, BrainLine.
Marilyn Spivack,
Marilyn Price Spivack is the neurotrauma outreach coordinator at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Boston. She is the co-founder and past president of the National Head Injury Foundation, now known as the Brain Injury Association of America. Her daughter, Deborah, sustained a severe traumatic brain injury in a car crash in 1975 when she was 15 years old.
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