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Project C: “TBI Caregiver
On-Line Needs Assessment
and Resource Access”
individuals afflicted with TBI will be developed
and refined. The subsequent study phase will
include placing the questionnaire on a selected
website for use by actual caregivers and other
interested parties. A series of branching programs
will be developed to link questionnaire results
to relevant educational and related resources. In
addition to resources with general relevance and
accessibility, a long range goal will be to include
support references and resources that are not only
specifically relevant, but also locally available.
Collaborating Agencies
:
•
Charlie Norwood VA Medical Center
•
Center for Telehealth, Medical College of
Georgia
In 1998, the Family Caregiver Alliance es-
timated direct and indirect costs of TBI to the
US health care system, to patients and to their
families at $48.3 billion annually, with survivor
costs of $31.7 billion annually. Lifetime costs for
one individual can total as much as $4 million.
TBI can seriously affect cognitive, physical, and
psychological skills. Physical deficits can involve
ambulation, balance, coordination, fine motor
skills, strength, and endurance. Cognitive deficits
of language and communication, information
processing, memory, and perceptual skills are
common. Psychological status is often altered. And
adjustment to disability issues during treatment is
frequently an important factor for all concerned.
When a TBI victim returns to the bosom of
her/his family and community, she/he has been
changed from the person they once knew. She/he
has support needs with which they are unfamiliar
and inexperienced. Unfortunately, there is not
now in place a mechanism for these caregivers
to understand and articulate their own needs for
developing competence in the support of their
damaged loved ones, and there is no systematic
way for them to learn of and gain access to the
resources required to assist them in that effort
The purpose of the study is to develop an online
assessment questionnaire and resource center for
caregivers of patients with TBI. The study is based
on the Resiliency Model of Family Stress, Adjust-
ment, and Adaptation and the Life Patterns Model
to form the conceptual framework for the effort.
In the initial phase of the study a needs as-
sessment questionnaire for lay caregivers of
future steps
It is too early in the studies we have proposed in
this paper to observe oscillations in the labora-
tory, but their common presence easily observed
in the field suggests that we should fully expect
to discover them also geospatially between treat-
ment at regional with telemedicine and primary
centers without it; between total treatment costs
and timeliness without and with e-health; and
between worldview self-reports of those who
have been treated in large centers and those in
family and home-town locations (we will con-
sider 1989Dawes and his colleagues, 1989!, who
stressed the importance of demographic data with
questionnaires as more reliable and valid data). In
the future, we also plan to collect comparative data
to test with panels for the existence of social and
psychological oscillations. And we plan further
progress reports.
concLusion
Social-psychological oscillations (SPHOs) are a
natural and common experience for humans. We
have built a mathematical model of these oscil-
lations which shows significant promise theoreti-
cally and with applications in the field. Regarding
its application to telemedicine and e-health, it is
too early to draw conclusions or to fully integrate
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