Introduction

Acquired brain injury (ABI) including traumatic brain injury (TBI) lead to worse and wider outcomes in children¹. The cultural factors can affect these outcomes.²

Royal London hospital is a major trauma centre serving a culturally diverse population. Our inpatient service includes weekly multi-disciplinary meetings with goal-directed therapy. The patients continue to receive community-based services after the discharge.

We looked to assess if there was any difference in perceived brain injury outcomes within our patient group based on ethnicity, type or severity of injury.

Methods

Children attending ABI follow up clinics between January 2015 and May 2016, at least 1 month after discharge were included. Parents/caregivers completed the ‘Child and Family Follow-up Survey’ questionnaire. Responses were scored and comparative statistics performed comparing ABI (Student’s t-test), ethnicity and mild/moderate/severe injury (ANOVA).

Results

Nineteen children were included. There was a statistically significant difference in parental rating of physical health with ABI versus TBI (poorer in ABI group, p=0.009). There were no statistical differences in function, participation, impact or service experience or in any domain when grouping by ethnicity or injury severity.

Conclusion

This evaluation suggests uniformity of service provision, with similar perceived outcomes following ABI, regardless of ethnicity, injury type or severity.This can be explained by the family adaptation post-injury, including refocused expectations.

The holistic design of the service with individualised interventions also facilitates this adjustment and leads to equitable outcomes. This study had limitations in numbers and length and further specific work is needed to interrogate this potentially important finding.