CBIST Spotlight: Carrie Van Quathem

Carrie Van Quathem, M.S., PT, CBIST serves as Director of Pediatric Rehabilitation at ChildServe. ChildServe’s inpatient and outpatient rehabilitation services are CARF-accredited in both pediatrics and brain injury specialties. Carrie’s leadership role and responsibilities include ensuring clinical quality, developing best practices and protocols, community outreach, measuring clinical outcomes, and implementation of ChildServe’s Clinical Learning System.

Carrie graduated from the Medical College of Virginia with her M.S. in physical therapy (1997) and certification in Interdisciplinary Teamwork from the Virginia Institute of Developmental Disabilities. She has attended a range of continuing education for the PT treatment of children and people with brain injury and has presented on multiple topics including behavior support, sensory integration, wheelchairs and medical equipment, rehabilitation, spasticity management, exercise and wellness, brain injury, concussion, outcomes management. She has been a part of the State of Iowa Brain Injury Community of Practices for mild and moderate/severe brain injury, a committee that drafted the concussion manual for schools in Iowa; a Certified Brain Injury Specialist Trainer, Past Chair of the Iowa Concussion Consortium, and is a member of the State of Iowa Advisory Council on Brain Injuries.

Why did you choose a career in pediatric brain injury? What are you most passionate about in the field? 

Pediatrics captured my heart and mind when I was in graduate school and was accepted into a special program that focused on training allied health professionals about interdisciplinary teams and family-centered care. At the time, I was also working as a “private assistant” for a teen with brain injury (BI) whose whole family had been impacted by BI due to a motor vehicle accident during a family vacation.  The importance of being able to help the whole child, the family, and getting them involved in their communities really struck me as being the most meaningful work I could do.

Why is having your CBIST important to you? 

Although most clinical education programs introduce new providers to the concepts of brain injury and have a class on pediatrics, it is at a very basic level and focused on the medical aspects of care. To have successful outcomes, you have to understand the systems the child and family are going to have to live in and how BI will impact their lives. The CBIS curriculum “rounds out” the education by looking at all aspects of brain injury. Seeing families struggle with living at home, behavior challenges, school issues, transitions of their child to adulthood really struck me on the importance of non-medical care in the rehab world and beyond. Being able to share experiences with clinical and direct-care providers and increase the compassion and understanding they have for families living with brain injury motivates me to expose people to the CBIS curriculum through regular training.

How has the pandemic impacted the pediatric population as it relates to brain injury rehabilitation needs, access, and services?

Iowa is a rural state and access to services became even more restricted during the pandemic. Having trained staff who understand the dynamics of living with brain injury helped our organization pivot and develop telehealth models to get some family needs met. Challenges were still significant. For inpatient rehabilitation, we had strict visitor rules that made the staff have to learn and adapt to providing even more support to families to assure everyone’s mental health needs were met. Maintaining staffing levels and mental resiliency of staff was also challenging – the CBIS curriculum helped our teams understand the stress we were under and develop strategies to address compassion fatigue in our staff and then even the families.

What advances have you seen in the field of pediatric brain injury rehabilitation that you are most excited about?

From a clinical care perspective, I think the combination of medical treatment in the ED and ICU setting that can minimize secondary impacts of brain injury really has improved outcomes, especially for children. In rehabilitation, we are getting more access to technology that really focuses on the symptoms related to brain injury that limits function, such as visual/vestibular training systems, functional electrical stimulation for relearning movement and gaining strength, reality-based technology. When looking at public awareness and advocacy, the attention placed on concussions in the last 5-10 years has really improved pediatric concussion care on the field and in the classrooms in addition to raising awareness about brain injury in general.