Doctor’s og patient’s delay ved diagnostisering, oppfølging og behandling av døvfødte barn? : En studie av veien frem til cochleaimplantat-operasjon.

ABSTRACT In Norway children with severe hearing loss have over the last few years been offered cochlear implants to restore their hearing. This is only done at Rikshospitalet (the national hospital in Oslo), and have so far included about 300 children. The recent years about 50 per year. Ideally the operation should take place before the age of twelve months, but in many cases the children have to wait considerably longer. Our goal was to determine on what level the process is held up. Is it the so called doctor’s delay or patient’s delay? We collected data from charts at Rikshospitalet, and listed all our findings in two groups called selection 1 and 2 depending on the years they got their implants. With this data we made statistical estimates of how long it took before the hearing loss was discovered, when treatment was initiated and when surgery took place. In addition the data included information on social factors, on family and on how the hearing loss was discovered. We also compared the two selections. There were few differences between the two selections, but a few variables showed a statistically significant increase in delay for those operated most recently. Other variables that seemed to influence the process were the number of middle ear infections and the presence of other disabilities in addition to the hearing loss. Our results mainly show that there are many possible delays in the process, and that the need for better guidelines and coordination is significant