Traumatic brain injury: factors predicting return to work or school

Prediction of outcome for brain-injured individuals will facilitate effective rehabilitation programme planning which will ultimately improve the patient's quality of life. A sample of traumatic brain-injured subjects who had completed their rehabilitation were contacted post-discharge to identify predictive factors for return to work/school. Subjects were given a telephone interview and their charts were examined retrospectively along five subsets of variables in the predictive matrix: sociodemographics, chronicity, indices of severity, physical impairment, and cognitive functioning. Forty-five subjects were used as the study sample to investigate their vocational and educational outcome, and to generate the best predictive model for return to work/school. Twenty subjects made up the test sample used to evaluate the generalizability of the predictive model. Performance IQ score of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised emerged as the most significant predictor of return to work/school. Implications of these findings for treatment and rehabilitation are discussed.