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I'm Gordon Johnson and I am here with Thomas Harding
and we're talking about brain injury. So Gordon, in the last interview we were talking about the
difficulties of
people with brain injuries in the workplace and
the next question that arises is, Is there anything
possible that can be done to help them get
or maintain jobs? I'm a huge believer in accommodation
and saving the still
wonderful mind that is struggling to get through the deficit.
I'm a big believer. What do you mean by accommodation?
Well let's start with the first one the easiest one to to conceptualize
is one to work around which is fatigue
Most people who I represent who tried to go back to work
can work effectively for a couple of hours.
If you expect them to work six or eight hours in an eight-hour day
they will have trouble but if you let them work two hours
and then give them an opportunity to allow
ltheir mind to rest; maybe it's just going in
dark quiet room and taking a nap or maybe it's just relaxing maybe it's just going out and sitting in their
car.
But if you can break up the amount of time they have to work
consecutively into increments
where it is within their tolerances, they can then come back refreshed
and continue working. Now maybe you only get four- five hours out of an eight hour day
but if you're talking about someone who's really valuable that might work.
Fatigue is made worse
by not sleeping well. There are a lot of things that can be done to help people
with sleep.
Sleep medicines, other therapies do help
and they're very very important for people with a brain injury to make sure
they get enough sleep
The one that's the hardest to work around
is probably the reliability issue.
That is showing up for work? Well that's an attendance issue and
that takes to some degree an extraordinary boss
but often if you deal with the fatigue issue you will have less
problems with the attendance issue. But no you wouldn't want your
person to necessarily go in to be the air traffic controller
under the maximum stress and push them to
to their limits. But perhaps a person could be an
air traffic controller as a fill-in, as a part timer.
I mean that's theoretically possible again, but it's not the ideal situation.
But if you help on the fatigue,
you tolerate some thing other than the perfect performance,
it's remarkable how much productivity you may still be able to
get out of people.
So what are the reliability issues then?
The reliability issues are
stress and an
increase in mistakes. Memory
is an issue, while not the biggest, it is
probably the easiest to accommodate
because you can find memory aids. Perhaps the most difficult to accommodate
other than the fact that there just
are these errors that seem to come out of nowhere is to find
find a way to give that
help, to be able to
take care of the initiative issues, to make sure that
it takes more supervision. And it may be more needy supervision, especially with
somebody
who is anxious. They may need much reassuring.
But over a period of time I think most people can get better
to the point where they can start to be productive. The question is there
any way to bridge from the
failures at the first attempt to return to what may ultimately work long term.
I did an interview with a gal as part of my
my TBI Voices Project, who's boss
would not let her be disabled. She was too important to him.
She was like the Jayne in my office, like the paralegal in your office, and he was
not going to let her not
not come back to work, and she had a severe brain injury. He had her back
doing work related things while she was still in the hospital.
He got her back to her desk. And
while she is not the same person she was before she got hurt
but she became eighty percent of as valuable to him as she was before
Her 80 percent to him because he had become so reliant on her,
she knew everything there was to know about what he needed to do,
her eighty percent efficiency was important enough
for him, that he made sure she got back to that level. She's working now
very very successfully and doing
the job she had before and not quite as efficiently as she used to do it but
she's doing it, and she is reliable,
because he gave her a chance to get back
to who she was.