Ethical Practice in Brain Injury Rehabiliation

Ethical Practice in Brain Injury Rehabilitation helps rehabilitation professionals deal effectively with the difficult ethical dilemmas that regularly face them in their daily clinical practice. The book takes a multiprofessional perspective, focusing on issues facing therapists, doctors, nurses, and psychologists, and will also be helpful to relatives of people with acquired brain injury. It treats ethics as a special case of good professional practice and takes a practical psychological approach, looking at the thoughts, feelings, and actions that are involved in taking ethical decisions, carrying them out, and living with their consequences. The book tells the story of brain injury from the patients' perspective, and argues that patient-centred practice that strives to uphold patient autonomy and support the reconstitution of personal identity is the basis of good rehabilitation. But it also acknowledges the difficulty in delivering patient-centred practice in a context of limited resources, diverse value systems, uncertain prognosis, and conflicting loyalties. The book contains many case histories, including a series of guided examples that will be useful for individual study or group work.

Joanna Collicutt McGrath was head of clinical neuropsychology at Rivermead Rehabiliation Centre in Oxford for many years before being head of psychological services at the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre NHS Trust. In both these posts she specialised in the rehabiliation and continuing care of people with complex neurological disabilities. Her main clinical and research interests are patient centred goal planning and the emotional impact of acquired brain injury. She has also carried out research in theology and is now lecturer in Psychology of Religion at Heythrop College, University of London. She is an Anglican priest.