Strategies supporting parent-delivered rehabilitation exercises to improve motor function after paediatric traumatic brain injury: A systematic review.

When a child has a traumatic brain injury, parents often become the ones delivering rehabilitation exercises at home. This review looked at six studies involving about 211 children to see what kinds of support actually help parents do this job well. The researchers found that successful interventions tend to include goal setting and clear instruction on how to perform the exercises.

However, most of the programs studied were good at getting parents started with rehabilitation but offered less support for keeping the exercises going over the long term. The authors conclude that parents need more help than what current approaches typically provide, and they call for future research to listen more carefully to what parents actually need.

When a child recovers from a brain injury, exercises done at home often play a big part in getting stronger and regaining abilities. This study looked at programs designed to help parents learn and deliver those exercises correctly.

Researchers found that programs combining clear goal setting and good instruction on how to do the exercises seemed to work better than others. What surprised them was that most programs helped families get started well, but didn't give as much help keeping the routine going after the first few weeks or months.

The researchers also noted that many programs didn't ask parents what they actually needed, which means there is room for better approaches in the future.

This is a summary of research, not medical advice. Talk to your own healthcare provider about anything affecting your care.

This systematic review examined parent-delivered rehabilitation for paediatric TBI across a small evidence base, six interventions with mixed methodological quality. All included studies incorporated goal setting and instruction, suggesting these are common denominators in supported parent delivery.

The Behaviour Change Wheel analysis revealed that interventions targeted initiation well but offered limited strategies for sustained adherence beyond the acute phase. The evidence base itself is limited and somewhat mixed in terms of population, with four of six studies including mixed aetiologies rather than TBI exclusively, which reduces the strength of specific conclusions for TBI alone.

The authors identified a notable gap between what parents receive at programme start and what they receive for maintenance, a distinction that may be clinically important given the longitudinal nature of paediatric rehabilitation. The call for integration of parent perspectives in future intervention design reflects a recognition that current approaches may not align with real-world constraints and motivations.