Staff Development

Abstract

Whereas staff education is important in all clinical endeavors, it is particularly important, for a number of reasons, in regard to treatment of brain-damaged patients. Perhaps most significantly, rehabilitationoriented treatment of brain-damaged patients is a somewhat new field, and little is known about it. Otherwise well-trained members of multidisciplinary treatment teams may be relatively untutored in regard to rehabilitation of individuals with brain dysfunction. They may know a great deal about the medical, physical, and psychiatric aspects of these disorders, but they may not know a great deal about neuropsychology; in our view the scientific specialty area that currently has most to say about various relationships between brain dysfunction and behavior. As we have already indicated, clinical neuropsychology or behavioral neurology is a relatively new field, and approaches to braindamaged patients from a treatment standpoint, using these fields as a knowledge base, have only been attempted in a few settings throughout the world. It is therefore usually necessary to provide the treatment staff with a great deal of technical information in an area that may be quite new to them.