It is with heavy heart that we come to the end of our 40th anniversary year with the loss of our founder, Dr Kevin W. Walsh, who passed away on Monday 4 December, 2017 aged 92 years. Kevin was an inspiration to us all and a friend and mentor to so many. I have heard Kevin frequently described with numerous superlatives capturing his amazing expertise across the full range of clinical, teaching and research practice in neuropsychology. Expertise however was not his only claim to fame, he was a warm, compassionate, wise and insightful man, a leader with a unique knack of challenging old ideas and planting the seeds for many new ones. Kevin will be missed far and wide by all who had the privilege of crossing paths with him.  Thank you so much Kevin for getting us started and for keeping us going over so many years.

 As the year closes and I reflect on the impressive quantum of activity that captures the ASSBI commitment to working together to improve the lives of people with brain impairment, there is much to be proud of. We have a strong membership with well over 400 members across multiple disciplines in all states. We continue to grow our commitment to the region and also more broadly with an eye to international collaboration. From a regional perspective, it is exciting to be planning our 2019 conference in Wellington, New Zealand with an aim to collaborate with the New Zealand Rehabilitation Association (NZRA).  Internationally, we have continued our productive dialogue with the International Neuropsychological Society (INS) with a view to both organisations collaborating by sharing information, providing expertise, giving mutual support, and developing joint action in areas of common interest.

The success of our society rests with numerous people and special 2017 thanks are in order to many. These include the amazing committee members; you can see them one and all https://assbi.com.au/Committees including Margaret our CEO who I can say confidently is without rival anywhere, our corporate partners Shine Lawyers who continue to give us such valuable support, the 2017 conference committee with Dana Wong at the helm who delivered our fabulous 40^th anniversary event in Melbourne – the largest ever stand-alone ASSBI conference with 445 delegates (You can refresh any waning memories and bring an ASSBI smile to your face by a visit to https://assbi.com.au/resources/Documents/2017%20Conference%20Report.pdf.); the 2018 conference committee members so ably led by Liz Williams who have created a marvellous program to entice you all to Adelaide https://assbi.com.au/ASSBI-Conferences and all the contributors to our rich and varied workshop and webinar program for 2017.

I would like to close my thanks with a particular special mention to Mike Hennessy who not only has tirelessly and expertly supported our web presence over many years but who also on his retirement has overseen the transition to the new site. Mike your contribution to ASSBI has been immeasurable and your quiet, supportive, reliable presence will be sorely missed – thank you 

Warmest wishes for the holiday season and a new year full of pleasant surprises,

Jacinta Douglas, President

I am very proud of the new website from Wild Apricot. This took a lot of work from a lot of people. I’d like to thank our President Jacinta for her unfailing support of me whilst this gruelling challenge took place.

Michael Sugg from Advance Web Design for his sense of humour, patience with me and my non-techy way of dealing with things and hours of behind the scenes hard work dealing with outside forces such as CVENT, G-Suite, PayPal and of course Wild Apricot themselves to get it to where it is now.

And last, but definitely not least, huge thanks to Mike Hennessy for the 25+ years of looking after the old website and his help with the transition to the new one.

Cheers, Margaret Eagers, EO

ASSBIS' multidisciplinary Journal.

The third issue of Volume 18 concludes another successful year for Brain Impairment with a growing number of submissions to the journal (68 to date this year). This has allowed us to start to build a bank of papers available online on FirstView awaiting allocation to an issue. 

Members are invited to check out some of these which will comprise a world class special issue on Quantitative Data Analysis guest edited by Robyn Tate and Michael Perdices to be published early in 2018.  

We would like to thank our guest editors, Editorial Board members and the many other reviewers who have contributed to the success of Brain Impairment in 2017. 

As always we are indebted to Jan Ewing and the Publications Committee for ongoing support in moving the journal forwards and to Margaret Eagers for her tireless management of all things administrative.

You should have received login instructions when you joined ASSBI, if you require any help with this please email Margaret

Jennifer Fleming and Grahame Simpson
Co-Editors

The full webinar programme for 2018 will be advertised in the new year on the Professional Development Page.

If you would like to see someone give a workshop in your State or know of anyone coming to Australia in 2018 who would like to give a workshop or webinar for ASSBI members, please email Margaret and we will endeavour to organise a full/half day workshop or a one-hour webinar.

2017 Webinar Series

#assbiwebinars

We had technical difficulties with Prof Vicki Anderson’s webinar. Vicki will endeavour to tape this and I’ll get it out to the people who have registered ASAP. Michael Perdices webinar is all set for 12^th December. Click here for information on all the webinars and speakers. Webinars go for 1 hour from 12.30pm – 1.30pm Sydney/Melbourne time and they are all available as an MP4 for you to watch at your leisure once purchased.

2018 Workshops

#assbiworkshops

Jennie Ponsford, Adam McKay and Dana Wong will be giving a full day workshop live in Perth and streamed to the rest of the country on 26^th February entitled: The nature and treatment of sleep disturbance and fatigue following brain injury. This workshop is brought to you by Brightwater Care Group, Monash University and ASSBI.  will also be streamed around the country – there will be 2 payment tiers, one for attendance in Perth and one for streaming. Click here for more information and to register.

ASSBI launches new website and Association Software.

After a lot of work and late nights from the VERY patient and hard-working Michael Sugg of Advance Web Design, our previous Webmaster Mike Hennessey, and myself ASSBI are proud to announce the launch of the new website from Wild Apricot. Obviously there will be some teething problems at first but all of us here at ASSBI hope you like the new set up.

We encourage you to go and have a look around, sign into the website (whether or not you are a member of ASSBI). Signing in will give you the opportunity to update your own information. We would also like to collect stats such as your discipline and where you come from to get a better idea of our community.

If you are a member of ASSBI Margaret will send you an email with your new membership ID number. You will also be able to set your own password and update your details.

When your membership is due you will, as usual, receive a reminder email with links to renew.  You can still renew online but we cannot take online payments just yet, so for the time being you can transfer your fees via the bank OR ring Margaret who will take payment over the phone.

We have imported a lot of data from CVENT but some people have not been transferred over for a number of reasons – they had opted out, email address’ had bounced or they had multiple cards. So if you know someone who didn’t get this email please ask them to go to the new site and sign up for the newsletter.

From now on Margaret will be our Webmaster so if you have anything you wish to go on or have any feedback please email her.

Margaret Eagers, Webmaster!

Do people with severe traumatic brain injury benefit from making errors? A randomized controlled trial of error-based and errorless learning. 

What the study is about

Individuals who have sustained a traumatic brain injury (TBI) often need to relearn a lot of skills they had previously mastered. There is some disagreement as to the best strategy to relearn these skills, however, one method that has been successful is ‘errorless learning’. Errorless learning refers to teaching the skill without ever allowing for errors to occur. The training session is designed in a way that requires the trainer to prompt with the correct response, rather than allowing the trainee to guess, and therefore risk laying down the memory of the error response. Learning in this method is often very specific and skills do not often generalise to other situations where the skill is needed outside of the training session. Error-based learning on the other hand involves structured feedback on performance (e.g., use of videos), graded prompts, and post-task reflection to teach how to anticipate errors, check for and correct errors, and generate strategies for overcoming those errors. This ‘metacognitive’ method has previously been shown to reduce errors on trained tasks, increase self-regulation and self-awareness, however, it was previously not known if this approach would promote greater generalisation of skills than errorless learning. This study aimed to determine this.

What we did

Fifty-four individuals with a severe traumatic brain injury were randomised either to the errorless learning group OR to the error-based learning group. They received 8 x 1.5 hour individual training sessions focused on meal preparation. The success of training was measured by total errors made during the Cooking Task (a standardised test of error self-regulation), as well as measure of broader generalisation (Zoo map test) and a number of other secondary outcome measures.

What we have found

After accounting for initial performance and level of pre-injury education, individuals in the error-based learning group demonstrated significantly fewer errors on the Cooking Task following training when compared to those in the errorless learning group. Those who received the error-based training strategies also demonstrated greater levels of self-awareness and behavioural competency at completion. Forty-one participants were re-tested 6 months following completion of training. There were no significant differences in social and vocational outcomes at this point. Results from this study demonstrate that having structured opportunities to make errors and learn to correct these plays an important role in the learning of skills during rehabilitation after severe traumatic brain injury.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the willing volunteers who participated in this research. The research would also not have been possible without funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council.

Registration is now open for the 41st Conference in Adelaide click HERE to find out more about the conference

TASIT AND TASIT-S

We are proud to announce that The TASIT has been improved and the 3rd Edition is now available through ASSBI.

Also there is a Short 20 minute TASIT called TASSIT-S available to buy

for more information & to order Click here...

The 41st ASSBI Conference will be held in Adelaide, South Australia on the 3-5th May 2018.

More information will be released soon. In the meantime here are some important dates for your diary.

Conference Programme and Registration – 1^st December 2017
Early bird closes – 1^st April 2018
Conference closes - 28^th April 2018
Workshops – 8.30am 3^rd May 2018
Welcome Reception – 7.00pm 3^rd May 2018
Conference starts – 8.30am 4^th May 2018
Conference dinner – 7.00pm 4^th May 2018
Conference concludes – 5.00pm 5^th May 2018 

FOR MORE INFORMATION CLICK HERE...