Welcome

Welcome to the ABIL website – which exists to serve its members and the wider brain injury community within London.

Working for better brain injury services

ABIL is a group of front-line professionals, policy makers, survivors of acquired brain injury and relatives and carers working to advance the brain injury agenda across London. It was launched during Brain Injury Awareness Week in March 2007

Our Aims

• To raise awareness of Acquired Brain Injury (ABI) across London
• To encourage the development and dissemination of good practice in the care and support of ABI survivors and their families and carers across London
• To campaign for better services for ABI survivors and their families and carers across London

As part of this, ABIL:

• Organises meetings on a range of topics of interest to people working in the field of brain injury in London – this enables people to hear about interesting work and share good practice, and also to meet and network informally
• Will be able to put members in touch with each other through this website
• Undertakes projects on particular issues
• Campaigns on a variety of fronts, for example, ABIL submitted a set of detailed comments as part of the consultation process on the new Major Trauma and Stroke services for London in May 2009
• Promotes education and training in acquired brain injury for professionals working with brain injury survivors and their carers across London

Why You Should Join Us?

ABIL is operating in a context where a number of government documents have in recent years recommended better and joined-up services for people who have had a brain injury and their carers – including the National Service Framework for Long-term (Neurological) Conditions (2005), the White Paper ‘Our health, our care, our say’ (2006) and ‘Putting people first: a shared vision and commitment to the transformation of adult social care’ (2007).  However, for a variety of reasons, things have not moved forward as much as we would have hoped, and there is an ongoing need to draw attention to the lack of appropriate services – where these exist – and generally to encourage good practice.

We feel strongly that ABIL must have representation from all stakeholders with an interest and commitment to ensuring that those across London who have had a brain injury, and their carers, are heard and seen and are given access to appropriate rehabilitation, care, support and information.

Thus we encourage, and are actively seeking, membership and involvement from colleagues in health, social services, housing, law, employment services, etc, in the statutory, private and voluntary sectors, working in this field at all stages of the care pathway, together with brain injury survivors and their carers.

ABIL is looking to its growing membership to help guide its future direction.

Membership is currently free to individuals and organisations.

Rehabilitation services for brain injury in London

A major aspect of this website is the guide to rehabilitation services which aims to help you quickly find services of different kinds and locate them on the map of London. It uses a service classification derived from work in the Eastern Region of England by Professor John Pickard and others (J R Soc Med, 2004; 97: 384–389) and is based on work subsequently carried out by Dr Richard Greenwood for services in London.

The guide is accessible on the Local brain injury services page. We hope this is useful to people working in health and social services, personal injury solicitors, and to brain injury survivors and their carers. We welcome feedback on features which will make the guide more useful.  Of course, providers or users of services not currently included should contact us with the necessary information – info@abil.co.uk

Events

As well as ABIL events, we try to list other forthcoming events of interest in the brain injury field.