Importance of the Quality of Life Assessment in the Content of Personalized Rehabilitation of Patients with Consequences of Traumatic Brain Injury

Abstract

Introduction: Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a chronic and progressive condition. A large proportion of patients with traumatic brain injury experience long-term physical, cognitive, and emotional limitations that affect their functioning, resocialization, and the quality of life. Objective: To develop a personalized rehabilitation routing scale that contains values of the quality of life indicators to improve rehabilitation of patients suffering from effects of traumatic brain injury. Materials and methods: The study was conducted in 2020–2022 and included 414 working-age patients, of whom 93.6 % were men and 62.0 % had severe traumatic brain injury. The World Health Organization Quality of Life questionnaire (WHOQOL-100) was used to conduct a longitudinal sociological survey while the Dembo-Rubinstein method was applied to establish the adequacy of self-assessment of the respondents with TBI. The statistical significance of differences in mean values of the quality of life indicators between the groups of patients was determined by the nonparametric Mann-Whitney U-test. The difference was considered significant at p < 0.05. The article presents the personalized rehabilitation routing scale developed by the authors and validated through Cronbach’s alpha calculation using the Data Analysis ToolPak for Microsoft Excel 7.0, as well as the methodology of scale development. Results: The neurological status and the quality of life of the respondents were checked annually during 2020–2022. Based on the rehabilitation routing scale by Belkin et al., the authors elaborated a personalized rehabilitation routing scale for patients with adverse effects of traumatic brain injury that considers values of their quality of life indicators. Method validation showed high internal consistency of our scale and correspondence of the mean quality of life indicators to neurological and social deficiencies of the respondents according to the rehabilitation routing scale. Conclusion: The personalized rehabilitation routing scale solves the task of a personalized approach to rehabilitation of patients with consequences of traumatic brain injury.