Mission

We host social activities for people recovering from acquired brain injuries to help them build knowledge, skills, experiences, and confidence to live life to the fullest.

Profile

We support adults in London who have suffered an acquired brain injury to rebuild their confidence and develop new skills to help them deal with the complexities of life. Acquired Brain Injury (ABI) can affect anyone and each year about 5,500 people are faced with having to deal with a new reality through strokes, accidents such as cycling collisions or other medical reasons in London alone. We work with individuals and their families to provide access to information and expertise and new experiences designed to support them to rebuild their lives.

What we do

We run activities that offer people a chance to increase their social life, have fun and experience new things.

We run activities that offer people a chance to learn new skills and knowledge.

We hope that we help people move on in their journey after an ABI, but there are no rules that say you have to achieve anything to stay involved with the activities.

We encourage people without an ABI to take part in our activities because this helps to support ABI becoming part of every day life.

We empower people with ABI to take on leadership roles and run FAABI.

We raise awareness of ABI.

What we don’t do

We don’t offer medical or clinical services.

We aren’t an advice service, a training organisation or a job club.

We aren’t proactively campaigning for change.

Acquired Brain Injury

An Acquired Brain Injury is a non-degenerative injury to the brain that has occurred since birth. It can be caused by an external physical force, by disease or by internal physiological events.

ABI includes:

1. Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) – which includes open, closed or penetrating head injury – occurs as a result of road traffic accidents, sport or leisure pursuits, assaults, falls or battle; and
2. Non-Traumatic Brain Injury – which may be caused by:

• • strokes and other vascular events;
  • tumours;
  • infectious diseases (e.g., encephalitis, meningitis);
  • hypoxia (lack of oxygen), often accompanied by ischaemia (lack of blood supply), resulting in a “hypoxic-ischaemic” brain injury after cardiac arrest;
  • metabolic derangement, most commonly due to severe hypoglycaemia;
  • toxic products taken into the body through inhalation or ingestion.

(Source: Acquired Brain Injury forum for London – http://www.abil.co.uk/tell-me-about/)