Coming soon!! …13.10.2025…
watch this space for updates and a pre-publication discount!
Severe and Profound Brain Injury: A clinician’s guide to complex neuro-disability.
Soeterik, S., Connolly, S., & Crawford, S. (2025).
Severe and Profound Brain Injury is a comprehensive guide offering clinicians practical tools, techniques and ways to structure thinking in approaching how to best assess and provide neurorehabilitation to patients with the most overwhelming and complex neuro-disability. Advances in acute care will lead to increasing numbers of people surviving with complex neuro-disability and more families will be challenged by a confusing and devastating form of loss. Most clinicians will not have encountered this level of impairment in clinical practice and can feel deskilled, challenged by how best to help and overpowered by the questions it raises.
This book proposes a paradigm shift in how to assess and formulate the cognitive, behavioural and emotional difficulties in complex neuro-disability. The task for clinicians is to look for ability in the face of global impairment, rather than focus on areas of disability. Practical advice is provided on how to approach thinking about the issues and design bespoke, person-centred assessments from first principles with robust methodology. Prolonged disorders of consciousness and locked in syndrome are discussed in detail.
Guidance is given to keeping the person at the centre of decision making and intervention planning, particularly as so many will lack mental capacity and require best interests’ decisions to be made on their behalf.
This is essential reading for established clinicians wanting to develop expertise working with these patients and their families, clinical psychologists, neuropsychologists, other health professionals, students and trainees.
We sit down with Dr Sonja Soeterik and Dr Sarah Crawford to discuss their forthcoming book:
What do you find rewarding about working with the most severely and profoundly brain injured people?
Every person is unique. Every injury has unique impacts. Every person requires a bespoke and personalised approach. It is so obvious to all what people with profound and complex neuro-disability cannot do, but it is our role to help identify what they can do and find a way to use their abilities despite the glaring disabilities. This creates lots of variety, requires creativity and working closely with our interdisciplinary colleagues. We enjoy the detective work of trying to understand what they are able to do and the problem solving of supporting them to have as much decision making in their lives as possible. Ultimately our goal is always to help people have the best lives post injury that they can.
Why did you write this book?
The way we talk about the most severe brain injury is typically by the severity of the acute injury not the severity of the outcome. The three of us have spent much of our careers working with people with the most severe brain injuries and we have seen the significant challenges faced by clinicians who are grappling with the level of complexities involved. Typically in our work it is possible if someone can’t speak to get around that and use alternative methods, or if they can’t move to be able to administer things that don’t rely on movement, or if they tire quickly to break up tasks over time, or if they have vision changes to rely on speech. In the most profound and severely brain damaged people they have global impairment in all domains, their sensory, cognitive, communicative, physical, fatigue, seating and positioning abilities etc are damaged. That means we have to think about the best methods to assess and support these people in a new way.
Who should read Severe and Profound Brain Injury: A clinician’s guide to complex neuro-disability?
We have always lamented the lack of a resource book to share with our professional colleagues, trainees and clinicians new to the field of the most catastrophic and severe outcomes following brain injury. We hope this book will provide a helpful guide to this challenging clinical arena and empower people to recognise the skills they do have from other forms of brain injury, albeit not the ones that probably first come to mind when thinking about this work!
Where can I get a copy?
Pre sales are available through our publisher Routledge, Amazon, Waterstones and other good book sellers!