Telehealth Programme for the Education and Enrichment of Relational Skills (PEERS) for adolescents with acquired and congenital brain injuries: a protocol for mixed-methods randomised trial.

Introduction: For adolescents with brain injury, challenges with social function often persist into adulthood, impacting social participation and quality of life. The Programme for the Education and Enrichment of Relational Skills (PEERS) is a manualised group-based intervention with preliminary evidence demonstrating improved social knowledge and participation for adolescents with acquired brain injury or cerebral palsy when delivered face to face. The recent COVID-19 pandemic and challenges for families living outside metropolitan centres to access the programme suggest a telehealth delivered PEERS should be explored. This study aims to compare telehealth PEERS to usual care in a mixed-methods randomised waitlist-controlled trial to determine preliminary efficacy to improve social functioning and secondarily to determine acceptability, feasibility, cost and contextual factors impacting the implementation.

Methods And Analysis: In this single-centre mixed-methods randomised waitlist-controlled trial, 32 adolescents with brain injury, aged 11-17 years attending mainstream high school and their caregivers will be randomised to receive either (a) telehealth PEERS once/week for 1.5 hours for 14 weeks or (b) usual care (UC). UC is highly variable in Australia but often comprises fortnightly occupational therapy, physiotherapy or speech therapy. The waitlist group will then receive PEERS following the 26-week retention time point. Measures will be administered at baseline, 14 weeks (immediately post) and then 26 and 52 weeks post baseline. The primary outcome is self-reported performance and satisfaction with social goals on the Canadian Occupational Performance Measure at 14 weeks. Secondary outcomes include self and parent-reported social competence, frequency of get-togethers with peers, self-report knowledge of social skills, frequency of peer victimisation and quality of life. An implementation evaluation will be done to determine acceptability, feasibility, cost and identify barriers and facilitators in the implementation of the intervention and map these against the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research. This study will assess the unit costs of implementing the PEERS from an Australian health system perspective.

Ethics And Dissemination: The Children's Health Queensland Hospital and Health Service and The University of Queensland Human Research Ethics Committees have approved this study. Findings will be disseminated in peer-reviewed journals and conference presentations.

Trial Registration Number: ACTRN1263000082606.