Engaging under- and/or never-engaged populations in health services: A systematic review

Patient engagement is a mechanism used to facilitate person-centred care, however, has not been realized in all patient populations. Often, many marginalized populations still remain under- and/or never-engaged. The purpose of this systematic review was to: 1) identify methods or interventions that have been used to engage under- and/or never-engaged populations in health services and 2) identify outcomes that are associated with engaging under- and/or never-engaged populations in health services. A comprehensive search using the Ovid MEDLINE, EMBASE and CINAHL databases was conducted to examine literature between January 2002 and January 2015. Twenty-nine studies met the inclusion criteria. Data was extracted from these studies and findings are synthesized based on discrete themes that map to the research objectives. The majority of studies were quantitative, repeated-measures designs and concentrated in the United States. Hispanic and Latino/a populations were most frequently included in these studies. The main methods of recruitment included: 1) referral from a healthcare provider, 2) patient self-referral after seeing advertisements on mass media or targeted media, 3) directly approached by researcher in-person or telephone, and 4) administrative databases. Interventions occurred primarily at the individual-level, however some system-level interventions were identified. Five main outcomes resulted from the interventions, including: 1) behavioural change, 2) physiological, 3) psychosocial, 4) system and 5) process. Finally, culture-specific components were embedded in the interventions, both as surface and deep structures. This study provides future direction for patient engagement related projects, as it relates to under-and never-engaged population in healthcare. Experience Framework This article is associated with the Patient, Family & Community Engagement lens of The Beryl Institute Experience Framework. (http://bit.ly/ExperienceFramework) Access other PXJ articles related to this lens. Access other resources related to this lens

Evaluating the Impact of Age, Acoustic Exposure, and Electrical Stimulation on Binaural Sensitivity in Adult Bilateral Cochlear Implant Patients

Deafness in both ears is highly disruptive to communication in everyday listening situations. Many individuals with profound deafness receive bilateral cochlear implants (CIs) to gain access to spatial cues used in localization and speech understanding in noise. However, the benefit of bilateral CIs, in particular sensitivity to interaural time and level differences (ITD and ILDs), varies among patients. We measured binaural sensitivity in 46 adult bilateral CI patients to explore the relationship between binaural sensitivity and three classes of patient-related factors: age, acoustic exposure, and electric hearing experience. Results show that ILD sensitivity increased with shorter years of acoustic exposure, younger age at testing, or an interaction between these factors, moderated by the duration of bilateral hearing impairment. ITD sensitivity was impacted by a moderating effect between years of bilateral hearing impairment and CI experience. When age at onset of deafness was treated as two categories (<18 vs. >18 years of age), there was no clear effect for ILD sensitivity, but some differences were observed for ITD sensitivity. Our findings imply that maximal binaural sensitivity is obtained by listeners with a shorter bilateral hearing impairment, a longer duration of CI experience, and potentially a younger age at testing. 198/200

Evidence for a neural source of the precedence effect in sound localization

Normal-hearing human listeners and a variety of studied animal species localize sound sources accurately in reverberant environments by responding to the directional cues carried by the first-arriving sound rather than spurious cues carried by later-arriving reflections, which are not perceived discretely. This phenomenon is known as the precedence effect (PE) in sound localization. Despite decades of study, the biological basis of the PE remains unclear. Though the PE was once widely attributed to central processes such as synaptic inhibition in the auditory midbrain, a more recent hypothesis holds that the PE may arise essentially as a by-product of normal cochlear function. Here we evaluated the PE in a unique human patient population with demonstrated sensitivity to binaural information but without functional cochleae. Users of bilateral cochlear implants (CIs) were tested in a psychophysical task that assessed the number and location(s) of auditory images perceived for simulated source-echo (lead-lag) stimuli. A parallel experiment was conducted in a group of normal-hearing (NH) listeners. Key findings were as follows: 1) Subjects in both groups exhibited lead-lag fusion. 2) Fusion was marginally weaker in CI users than in NH listeners but could be augmented by systematically attenuating the amplitude of the lag stimulus to coarsely simulate adaptation observed in acoustically stimulated auditory nerve fibers. 3) Dominance of the lead in localization varied substantially among both NH and CI subjects but was evident in both groups. Taken together, data suggest that aspects of the PE can be elicited in CI users, who lack functional cochleae, thus suggesting that neural mechanisms are sufficient to produce the PE