Staff Education : Substance Abuse, Anxiety and Depression in Persons with Traumatic Brain Injury

Abstract Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) is a global epidemic (Schwarzbold et al., 2008). According to Brey (2006), a brain injury occurs every 21 second in the United States, which results in 1.5 million head injuries annually. The purpose of this project was to educate psychiatric personnel regarding the needs of the TBI population and to measure learning and retention. This is a quality improvement project that utilized a pretest and posttest design with an educational intervention. The intervention was administered electronically via Microsoft PowerPoint. Results were measured with the Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test. A total of 17 participants completed the pretest and posttest, and 11 completed the second posttest; the second posttest administered six weeks after the initial posttest. The results show that knowledge increased from pretest to posttest, (p \u3c 0.05), however, retention of the material did not occur per test results, (p ≥ 0.05). There is no other research to compare to these results. Therefore, more research and educational intervention are needed to educate psychiatric personnel regarding the needs of the TBI patient