Working with mild traumatic brain injury: voices from the field.

Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), also known as concussion, is an emerging public health issue in the United States. The estimated annual 1.2 million individuals who sustain this injury face a range of cognitive, psychological, and physical consequences for which rehabilitation protocols are being developed and implemented. On the frontlines of this developing area of rehabilitation work are professionals in a range of therapeutic settings whose practice wisdom has yet to be shared in the professional literature. This qualitative study aimed to fill this gap by exploring the experiences and insights of rehabilitation professionals serving mTBI patients in outpatient, civilian settings. An analysis of the qualitative data revealed five themes common in mTBI work, providing an in-depth look at this often challenging field of rehabilitation.

Neglected voices: consumers with serious mental illness speak about intensive case management.

This study explores early alliance formation between adult consumers with schizophrenic-spectrum disorders and their case managers from the consumers' perspectives using a prospective, cohort design. While quantitative studies have demonstrated positive links between the alliance and some client outcomes, such methods cannot reveal in concrete and authentic ways what consumers want in the case management relationship. This study finds that consumers can provide tangible and insightful information about the specifics of their case management relationships, confirming previous findings about the desire for connection with others, while extending it to include the desire for connection to the social world through the case manager relationship.