MISSION & PURPOSE

KEITH CICERONE, PhD, ABPP-Cn, FACRM

ACRM Cognitive Rehabilitation Training Faculty,
Director of Neuropsychology
JFK Johnson Rehabilitation Institute, Edison, NJ

“For 20+ years, ACRM has been conducting evidence-based reviews of cognitive rehabilitation, the initial review in 2000 and the subsequent updates, we continue to update the literature and revise our clinical recommendations.

These recommendations are intended to help clinicians know how and when to implement what types of interventions for what types of deficits or problems that their patients may be experiencing.

Unfortunately, the nature of the actual therapies is not always evident in the clinical scientific literature, and so there’s a terrific need to translate the evidence into practical recommendations for the clinician.

That (concept) serves as the basis in the evolution of ACRM Cognitive Rehabilitation Training courses. The two-day course takes the evidence training and translates it into clinical recommendations and illustrates the application of those clinical recommendations for practicing therapists.

It’s our hope that we can facilitate evidence-based clinical implementation through the Courses and provide therapists immediately with tools they can use to take back to their clinical environment and facilitate their clinical practice.”

Statement of need and target audience

Educational opportunities that promote evidence-based interventions for cognitive rehabilitation are needed by clinicians in order to provide optimum care for individuals with brain injury.

ACRM Cognitive Rehabilitation Training provides such an opportunity by presenting evidence-based standards and guidelines for clinical practice and translating them into step-by-step procedures for use by clinicians. The interventions described can be readily used by occupational therapists, speech and language therapists, psychologists, and other rehabilitation professionals.

ACRM DIFFERENCE = EVIDENCE-BASED

Evidence-based practice is not just dependent on the clinical literature and scientific evidence.

In fact, there’s three legs of the school of evidence-based practice:

  1. Basing treatment on the best available scientific evidence.
  2. But the second principle of evidence-based practice is reliance on the clinician’s judgment and individual decision making in how to apply that evidence to the individual patient.
  3. And the third judgment is taking into consideration the patient’s values and preferences regarding treatment.

Our emphasis in developing the clinical recommendations has been on the literature pertaining to patients who have sustained either traumatic brain injury or stroke.

There’s a reliance on clinical judgment and so we hope that the recommendations provide some information to therapists working with other populations, but that’s an example of taking the evidence and applying it “off-label,” if we can use that expression. It’s often used for medications that are used not as initially intended.

WHO can benefit from the training?

Anybody working with patients with neurologic impairments, specifically with cognitive impairments after a neurologic illness or injury, can benefit from these trainings irregardless of discipline.

Speech therapist, occupational therapist, physical therapist, physician, neuropsychologist, recreational therapist, vocational counselor — all can benefit.

If you are devoted to helping people with cognitive deficits and part of your practice is intended towards helping people overcome the limitations on their daily functioning as a consequence of cognitive limitations, and that’s part of your daily therapeutic intent and practice— or even if that’s only something that may come occasionally in your practice—you will get information from the ACRM COGNITIVE REHABILITATION TRAINING COURSE that will allow you to take the best available evidence and use it clinically.

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