Traumatic Brain Injury
Advantage Healthcare Systems offers comprehensive brain injury rehabilitation programs that cover the continuum of care. Every person’s medical situation is unique, so our treatment plans are fully customized to each patient’s needs.
Advantage provides 4 to 8 hours of therapy and treatment per day.
Post-Acute Day Program (Outpatient)
This program allows patients to receive treatment for 4 to 8 hours per day, Monday through Friday. During daily therapy, patients receive personal attention focused on their individual goals and needs.
Each patient’s treatment is specifically designed around his or her unique needs and goals, offering a clear plan for reinforcing daily living skills and encouraging leisure activities. Each personalized plan is focused on areas such as physical functioning, communication, cognitive treatment, daily living activities, community integration, leisure activities, psychological adjustment and behavior management.
Types of Therapy and Individual Treatments
Physical Therapy
Physical therapy helps patients improve mobility, reduce pain, and restore function through therapeutic exercise and functional training, with the use of assistive and adaptive devices and equipment.
Physical therapy covers many skills, such as:
- Gait training
- Balance
- Strengthening and core-stabilizing activities
- Reintroduction to physical activities such as walking and running
Occupational Therapy
Occupational therapists help patients with activities of daily living, including but not limited to:
- Grooming and dressing
- Handling money, paying bills
- Hobbies and leisure activities
- Shopping
- Home upkeep
- Cooking
- Driving
Speech/Language Therapy
Speech/language pathologists help patients regain the ability to:
- Understand simple and complex conversations
- Produce speech that can be understood by others
- Communicate meaningfully
- Function successfully in social communication situations
- Manage conversational norms
Therapeutic exercises target speech muscle strengthening, language-focused training and strategy development, and social conversation training.
Cognitive Rehabilitation
When our treatments are combined with functional, individualized therapy activities, each patient’s best potential is enhanced to recover his or her most important brain skills and abilities, such as memory, attention, and problem solving.
Behavioral Therapy
Our psychologists and team members assist patients struggling with depression and anxiety and help them replace maladaptive and sometimes self-destructive behaviors with new, more appropriate actions that make it easier to create an environment of success for themselves.
Occupational Rehabilitation
Many of our patients want to return to work. We assess each patient to successfully reenter the working world. By conducting in-depth professional evaluations to determine the person’s abilities and interests, our specialists help patients not only learn and practice everything from workplace behaviors to interview skills but also understand their unique abilities and challenges to return to their previous job or to identify a new career or volunteer or educational options.
Biofeedback
Biofeedback is used for the treatment of many common pain problems, most notably headache and back pain. The patient is trained to become aware of, to follow, and to gain control over certain bodily functions, including muscle tension, heart rate, and skin temperature. The individual can then learn to effect a change in his or her responses to pain such as using relaxation techniques. Biofeedback is often used in combination with other treatment methods; similarly, the use of relaxation techniques in the treatment of pain can increase the patient’s feeling of well-being.
Counseling
At Advantage Healthcare Systems, treatment is a mental, physical, and emotional process of growth and development. Individuals attending counseling sessions learn the current facts about their condition. They receive an intense combination of therapy, education, and social conditioning. We focus on a lifetime of recovery and creating a brighter and more productive future.
During counseling sessions, patients might be asked to discuss a series of topics about themselves including but not limited to:
- Stress
- Don’t know how to cope with life circumstances
- Depression
- Anxiety
- Self-esteem
- Identity issues {including cultural, religious, gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender, etc.}
- Body image
- Eating disorders
- Loneliness
- Difficulty forming or maintaining healthy relationships
- Physical or emotional abuse (past or present)
- Cross-cultural issues (including cultural conflicts between parents and children)
- Difficulty defining problems
- Marked changes in functioning
- Irritability
- Changes in thinking or perceptual abilities
- Difficulty setting limits with others
Team Members of Our Traumatic Brain Injury Program
Our traumatic brain injury team members include:
- Clinical neuropsychologists
- Board-certified physical medicine and rehabilitation physicians
- Board-certified neurologists
- Psychologists
- Physical therapists
- Occupational therapists
- Speech therapists
- Licensed professional counselors
- Licensed master’s-level social workers
- Nurses
- Rehabilitation technicians
- Case managers
Our teams create treatment activities that the individual will not only enjoy but will also mimic in their everyday lives.
