Children who survive severe brain trauma live with profound cognitive impairments that alter their developmental course and define their future possibilities. A formal collaboration exists between brain trauma physicians and researchers in the United States and Latin America. The long-term goal of this working group is to create a structure for professionals and institutions involved in brain trauma that generates research, and facilitates education, certification, and the dissemination of information and resources across Latin America. The structure will be the Latin American Brain Injury Consortium (LABIC). This planning grant will take the first step in establishing LABIC. The Guidelines for the Acute Medical Management of Traumatic Brain Injury in Infants, Children, and Adolescents (Adelson, Bratton, Carney et al., in press) will be implemented in six trauma hospitals in Argentina.
Specific aims of the project are: 1. To survey resources and treatment practices for, and outcomes from pediatric TBI in six hospitals in Argentina, in order to assess the need for both guidelines, as well as for a structure for communication and dissemination of information. 2. To develop resources, including education and technology that will expand the capacity of the existing collaboration to implement and evaluate the guidelines. 3. To generate preliminary data about the effect of dissemination strategy on physician understanding and practice, and patient outcomes, by conducting a pilot randomized trial of three strategies for disseminating the pediatric TBI guidelines: provision of the Guidelines publication; provision of the Guidelines publication with a written instructional supplement; provision of the Guidelines publication with instruction, monitoring, and assessment using a simple set of telemedicine tools. 4. To demonstrate the feasibility of conducting research and collecting data in Argentina, and to identify the most reliable data points and methods for data collection. 5. To use our findings to solicit support for the expansion of the project to the rest of Latin America.
