A clinically and neurophysiologically led postacute rehabilitation programme

Abstract

The Centre for Rehabilitation of Brain Injury was established by the first author (ALC) in 1985, initially with funding from the Danish Egmont Foundation, to provide a rehabilitation service to postacute brain-injured adults. At that time, no such facility existed in Denmark. The history of the Centre can, however, be traced further back to the late 1960s, when ALC, then a clinical psychologist in a neurosurgical department, encountered the works of A. R. Luria, in particular, his Higher Cortical Functions in Man [1]. Three visits to Luria’s clinic in Moscow culminated in the first systematic presentation of Luria’s neuropsychological investigation techniques [2]. By the late 1980s rehabilitation centres were beginning to emerge in the United States, and ALC visited several of these, particularly those of Ben-Yishay in New York and Prigatano, then in Oklahoma. At the time that the establishment of the Copenhagen centre was being negotiated, ALC was working in a hospital psychiatry department, but it was decided that a rehabilitation centre such as the one envisaged would best be located outside a medical environment, so the collaboration and hospitality of Copenhagen University’s Psychological Laboratory was sought and was kindly forthcoming. The university setting has led to our referring to the people entering our programme as lever, which can be translated as ‘students’, but in the present context we shall refer to them as ‘clients’.