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Acquired Brain Injury in Queensland - Fact Sheet

Acquired brain injury (ABI) is a deceptively significant and broad-reaching issue. In Australia the number of people severely affected by acquired brain injury is similar to the number of people with an intellectual disability.

It is a particularly salient issue for Queensland, which has the highest rate of traumatic brain injury associated hospital admissions of all States of Australia. Brain injury has very much remained a “hidden disability” that has received limited attention and understanding.

INCIDENCE, PREVALENCE, AND AREAS OF NEED

There is no recently published information about the incidence of acquired brain injury in Queensland. Data from all Queensland hospitals is used to obtain information about incidence.

There are three issues to consider about these data:

They do not include people with brin injury who do not present at hospital
They may not include people who have sustained other physical injuries who are unaware at the time of discharge that they have an acquired brain injury
One injury can lead to multiple data entries for a person.

Data from the 1998 Survey of Disability, Ageing and Carers indicates there were around 244,100 people in Queensland who had experienced an acquired brain injury at some time in their lives. Of these people, 63,400 experience disabilities from their brain injury that interfered with their daily activities in some way (e.g. disabilities in the areas of communication, mobility, self care, schooling, or employment).

While incidence data provide relatively clear information about the numbers of people sustaining an acquired brain injury, they are somewhat less clear when used to try to determine geographic areas of need. When planning services, it is important to keep in mind the fact that there is a high incidence of brain injury throughout regional Queensland and that all areas, potentially, have very high levels of need.