You Are the Key to Successful Memory Evaluation

You have thirty minutes to evaluate a newly referred client’s memory. You know that they sustained a moderate traumatic brain injury a month prior, but you don’t have access to their medical records or standardized memory tests. Your only tools are a pen and a piece of paper.

What do you do?

Clinicians Make for Successful Evaluations, Not Standardized Tests

In a perfect world, you would always have access to your client’s case history, the ability to interview caregivers, and the option of both standardized and non-standardized approaches. Unfortunately, we don’t always have these resources available when it comes time to evaluate memory following an acquired brain injury. But in these cases, we still need to be able to effectively and efficiently perform our evaluation.

A Non-Standardized Approach

Use the first part of your evaluation to learn about your client’s memory both before and since the injury. You can start by asking the following questions:

• What are some specific examples, from both before and after the injury, of when your memory worked well and when it didn’t?
• What factors made it hard for you to remember before your injury and how has that changed since your injury? For instance, perhaps the sun is currently shining brightly through the window during your evaluation and this is distracting them and breaking their concentration.
• What did you do to help yourself remember before the injury? What are you doing to help yourself remember since?

You can also test short-term memory, working memory, and long-term memory for auditory and visual stimuli using informal storytelling/retelling and drawing/redrawing tasks.

Your Client Will Show You the Way

Throughout the evaluation, pay attention to your client’s accuracy of the stimuli recalled, the strategies they use to remember information, and their error patterns.

Explore ways to help your client remember more accurately and more efficiently during a second storytelling or drawing task. You’ll get a sense of the type of memory difficulties they are having based on how they do on the tasks.

Memory evaluation is best done with a combination of standardized and non-standardized approaches, but not every evaluation situation is going to be ideal. When standardized methods aren’t available, try these techniques to obtain information about your client’s memory function to inform the therapy process.