To promote brain injury awareness month, the Halifax Chapter of the Brain Injury Association is inviting the public to attend a special movie viewing:

On June 29th at 7:30 pm the movie ‘Breakaway’ will be shown in the Royal Bank Theatre at the Halifax Infirmary, 1796 Summer Street (level 1 Summer Street lobby).
We will also have a post-movie discussion with the subjects and director/producer of the documentary.

There will be no admission charged to the movie showing, but donations to the Brain Injury Association of Nova Scotia will be accepted at the door.

For more information contact HalifaxBIANS@gmail.com.

Brain Injury Association of Nova Scotia
Room 13-009/010
13th Floor, Victoria Building, VG Site, QEII
Phone: (902) 473-7301
Fax: (902) 473-7302
Mail: PO Box 8804, Halifax, NS B3K 5M4
Website: www3.ns.sympatico.ca/bians1
A Helping Hand to a New Beginning

A report on collaboration from the Injury Alliance Collaborative Study Project
Final Report 15/06/2010
Prepared By: Philip Groff, Ph.D., Study Leader

Executive Summary
In January 2009, the Chief Staff Officers (CSO) from four national injury prevention organizations, Safe Communities Canada, Safe Kids Canada, SMARTRISK Foundation,
and ThinkFirst Canada, began meeting to discuss ways to work together collaboratively in order to advance their collective mission. On July 1, 2009, the Injury Alliance submitted a grant proposal to the Ontario Trillium Foundation and successfully secured $117,000 to conduct a six-month study to seek “a game changer” that would build their capacity as individual organizations to promote what works in preventing life-altering injuries and injury-related deaths.

To this end, the study was designed to examine how the four organizations might jointly identify, integrate, and approve shared initiatives in knowledge management, stakeholder engagement, fund development, and marketing―to speak with one voice. It was expected to produce recommendations that would assist each organization, in partnership with their natural allies, in increasing the awareness, understanding, and uptake among their respective target populations of what works to reduce the incidence and costs of preventable injury and death. Beginning in January 2010, some 40 volunteers and staff with a broad mix of expertise and experience comprised the four study groups, one dedicated to each of knowledge management, stakeholder engagement, fund development, and marketing.

The study groups each conducted a pair of teleconference meetings in January and February, as well as engaging in individual and joint consultation with their respective leaders throughout the winter of 2010. The four groups came together during the weekend of March 26-28, 2010, in Toronto, to finalize and present the recommendations each group developed.

Read the One Voice Safer Canada Report (pdf)

Brain injury awareness
On behalf of the March of Dimes Acquired Brain Injury Program, I would like to extend many thanks and gratitude to our Timmins Community Policing, and the Porcupine Health Unit, along with the Seizure & Brain Injury Centre.

Our agency was welcomed to participate in their annual bike rodeo, held indoors at the McIntyre Arena for local Grade 2 and 3 students.

The four services involved, provided separate stations that shared in the importance of educating young children, by practising safe use of equipment to prevent injuries.

The bike rodeo had helped us in providing public awareness on the effects of traumatic brain injuries related to improper bicycle or helmet use.
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Leo Ezerins, Executive Director of the CFL Alumni Association and Harry Zarins, Executive Director of the Brain Injury Association of Canada are pleased to announce a partnership between both associations.

The partnership is a culmination of discussions, that will see BIAC support the alumni in creating awareness about mild Traumatic Brain Injuries and Brain Injuries and act as an information portal for alumni to access. Through our provincial and grassroots associations, the CFL Alumni and their families will have a network of support systems when required to deal with those suffering from acquired brain injuries. This is a relationship that will grow stronger as we progress over the next few months.

The National Educational Association of Disabled Students (NEADS) is pleased to announce our 2010 national conference, ‘Learning Today, Leading Tomorrow’. It will take place in Winnipeg, Manitoba at the Delta Hotel from November 12-14. The conference will focus on solutions to drive change in accessible education and employment for students with disabilities.

This year’s event will be an exciting opportunity for students, consumer advocates, service providers, employers and all others interested in exploring key issues of equal access to post secondary education and employment for students and graduates with disabilities. The fully bilingual conference welcomes delegates from across Canada and around the world!
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By James N. Dillard, M.D.

(June 24, 2010) “Things in the head are not good,” our neurology professor grimly intoned. He stroked at his salt-and-pepper beard in a classic doctor’s gesture. We had just come from the bedside of a 28-year-old carpenter who had fallen two stories from a work scaffold and struck his head. The patient was barely conscious.

We can transplant hearts, kidneys, corneas, lungs, and livers. We can replace insulin, growth hormone, estrogen, testosterone, progesterone, and aldosterone. Big joints and little joints can be traded in for titanium and plastic ones. But we have only one irreplaceable brain.

Encased in that bony box on top of your neck is by far the most sophisticated single thing on earth — and it’s barely used. Most of us live narrowly within habit, prejudice, and repetition. In the words of Albert Einstein, “He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.”

And yet, any loss of this wondrous device can be devastating. Stroke, dementia, Parkinson’s, aneurysm, Alzheimer’s, and Lou Gehrig’s disease are some of the most feared conditions that we have. Though these disorders are frequently discussed, brain injuries are less often mentioned.
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The impact and consequences of a “brain injury” on any individual, family or relationship can have an effect that reaches far beyond the injured survivor. As how a brain injury affects who a person once was; it also affects how a primary caregiver and family once were. Relationships, family roles and responsibilities can experience change. Interpersonal communication can become a serious challenge to everyone connected with this scenario and who maybe dealing with their own myriad of intense feelings of shock, denial, anger, and depression that can accompany the losses resulting from such a traumatic injury.

A brain injury can change a family’s functionality, balance, its dynamics, harmony and landscape forever. “It has been said, that although we may not have physically lost the person, there is often the loss of the person we once new”. Losing someone you care for can be painful, however when it comes to brain injury, we live with a living reminder of that loss each day which can make it even more difficult. Support for families who live with, care for and provide structured support to a survivor is an area often overlooked, underfunded and needing more attention and focus. .

Support for families who live with a survivor is often scarce. What each family requires can vary however there are some fundamental basics that would be helpful for all. Support can be beneficial with; helping family’s through different challenges and transitions, understanding brain injury and what they are seeing, reducing stressors, living with a survivor, acquiring coping strategies, creating independence with the goal of reducing dependency, how to support a survivor and move forward and living within altered relationships to list a few.
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More Photos of the brainStormRIDE, Brad Cownden in Saskatchewan

In this issue
Making the Most of Information 1
Working Out Depression 3
Stem Cell Global Blueprint Conference 5
Wired for Success 5
A Revolving Door? 6
One in Four 7
Upcoming Events 8

Making the Most of Information Ontario Spinal Cord Injury Registry Pilot In Ontario, health care planning for people with spinal cord injury (SCI) can be a bit of a guessing game based on partial information and anecdotal evidence. This is because in Ontario there is no registry, i.e. no collection, of health care information for people with SCI.

Continue reading NeuroMatters Connecting YOU to the Research Issue 11 (pdf)