Community-based empowerment programme for families with a brain injured survivor: an outcome study

Rehabilitation of brain injured persons has been one of the challenges of the modern health care team. Brain injured persons' problems are termed complex and multiple, and may persist long after the acute management stage. Families caring for their brain-injured members are, however, ill prepared to face this long-term rehabilitation process. A previous study of an empowerment framework applicable among these Hong Kong Chinese families resulted in the development of a 52-item empowerment questionnaire with four interpretable factors (efficacy, knowledge, support and aspiration). This can also serve as a valid and reliable outcome measure of their empowerment efforts. As a follow-up of this development, an 8-week community-based empowerment programme was thus designed and implemented for a total of 50 family members in six repeated groups. Outcome indicators including empowerment questionnaire, psychological well-being, self-efficacy, subjective experience of the burdens in care-giving, and support systems were used to monitor changes in empowerment status during the periods of pre- and post-programme, and during the 3 month follow-up. The programmes were found to be effective in empowering family members in the four postulated empowering dimensions, and improving all other outcome measures. The follow-up studies reflect stability in empowerment, though there were no further improvement. From regression analysis, it was suggested that, for optimum empowerment to take place, important predictors included careers' education levels, age ranges and work status.