ABSTRACT
Traumatic brain injury can lead to profound interactional difficulties, which most communication partners find challenging, sometimes embarrassing, and even exhausting to deal with during everyday social encounters. The effect of these difficulties is often compounded by the realization that they may be entrenched and therefore difficult to modify in the long term. Those for whom the person with TBI predominately interacts include family members, wives, husbands, mothers and children and therefore it is for these people that communication problems can be the most difficult to deal with on a daily basis. The person with TBI will also have contact with people in the community including shop assistants, service providers, people who work for government agencies and, in some cases, law and justice personnel. Until recently, there has been a paucity of research investigating how to improve the knowledge, skills and confidence of communication partners to deal with difficult conversational behaviours. This chapter describes our programme of research, which has: (1) investigated novel ways to evaluate the interactions of people with TBI; and (2) studied the effectiveness of education and training for communication partners including police officers (Togher et al., 2004), family members (Togher et al., 2013) and paid caregivers (Behn et al., 2012).
