New Booklet Helps Families Navigate System After TBI
Attorney Frank Toral has written a booklet called “My Child Has a Brain Injury: what do I do now?” The booklet is a concisely written and is clearly well thought our, and is designed to help parents, family members and caregivers navigate the confusing maze that is intertwined in healthcare, insurance and legal issues.
Toral is managing partner at Toral & Associates Attorneys at Law, a firm that is committed to serving family members and survivors of brain injury. The booklet grew out of his experiences working on brain injury. We want to let them know about resources and to consider long term needs,” Toral told the Voice during a recent interview at his Ft. Lauderdale office.
Toral believes that the legal, medical and insurance systems should work together and not be adversarial when it comes to helping families through the challenges brought on when one of their members sustains a brain injury, “We want to create a ‘Blanket-of-Support Team”, he emphasized.
Toral and his wife Olivia have a baby daughter, Nina, and in part, because he saw what brain injury can do to families he dedicated to develop his law practice in the same area of brain injury and to also become personally involved. For example, he is the President-Elect of the Brain Injury Association of Florida (BIAF) and recently was a sponsor of a statewide fundraising gala (see page 10). He is also a board member of Mothers Against Brain Injury, Inc. and a member of the University of Miami/ Jackson Memorial Hospital Pediatric Neurotrauma Advisory Board.
The user-friendly booklet is just forty pages and provides straightforward information and things that need to be considered. As he notes in the book, insurance companies will send their professional staff out immediately to begin gathering information after there has been a brain injury. Families are understandably more concerned with the day to day issues and the survival and physical recovery of their loved one.
In the introduction on his web site Frank Toral notes: “we firmly believe that it is only through joint cooperation with healthcare providers and others that we can effectively represent persons who have suffered a serious injury and their families along the continuum of care.”
Toral has underwritten the booklet with an initial printing of 2,500 and another 5,000 planned. It is free to hospitals, institutions, health care professionals. He thanks Tracy East, who is the founder of Mothers Against Brain Injury (MABI) for her inspiration to write the booklet, Valerie Breen, Executive Director of the BIAF for providing resources information, Betty Paleolog- Torres and Alex Garcia, members of the firm for their efforts and Marilyn Lash of Cluett & Lash Consulting who edited and published the booklet.
“This is the first of three phases. We also plan a booklet for adult brain injury and to publish Spanish language versions of each booklet,” Toral stated.
Ed. Note: Visit the web site www.mychildhasabraininjury.com or contact Frank Toral, toll free at 866-747-7848. The law firm web site is www.torallaw.com.
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