38 research outputs found
The Future of Healthcare Delivery: IPE/IPP Audiology and Nursing Student/Faculty Collaboration to Deliver Hearing Aids to Vulnerable Adults via Telehealth
A multi-departmental, two-city initiative to provide hearing aid service via a telepractice approach was developed whereby nursing and auditory students with supervisory faculty used AV conferencing for training and interaction with referred patients. Located in two cities, 21 nursing and 15 doctoral level audiology students met virtually, and students received teleaudiology education and practicum with interprofessional education and practice components. Nursing students in one city and a supervising faculty in another city could interact with providers and patients in both cities to provide hearing care. The teleaudiology project delivered hearing health care services, including fitting of digital mini hearing aids, to 181 patients over 29 months of the project. During that time period, 205 total patients were referred to the teleaudiology clinic. Over 90% of these patients, as assessed by either patient teleaudiology clinic visits or telephone follow-up, successfully wore their hearing aids. Students administered selected published surveys related to patient outcomes both pre and post fitting. Patients reported significant hearing handicap reduction and were very satisfied with the teleaudiology mode of digital hearing aid and hearing health care service delivery. The experience provided interprofessional pre-service exposure to cutting edge technology and an innovative delivery system for future members of the healthcare workforce
Older And Younger Adult Cochlear Implant Users: Speech Recognition In Quiet And Noise, Quality Of Life, And Music Perception
Purpose: To determine whether older cochlear implant (CI) listeners differ from younger CI listeners on measures of speech understanding, music perception, and health-related quality of life (HRQoL). In the study, the authors hypothesized that speech recognition would be more difficult for older adults, especially in noisy conditions. Performance on music perception was expected to be lower for older implanted listeners. No differences between age groups were expected on HRQoL. Method: Twenty older (>60 years) and 20 younger (<60 years) implanted adults participated. Speech understanding was assessed using words and sentences presented in quiet, and sentences presented at +15, +10, and +5 dB signal-to-noise ratio conditions. Music perception was tested using the University of Washington Clinical Assessment of Music, and HRQoL was measured using the Njimegen CI survey. Results: Speech understanding was significantly lower for the older compared with the younger group in all conditions. Older implanted adults showed lower performance on music perception compared with younger implanted adults on 1 of 3 subtests. Older adults reported lower HRQoL benefit than younger adults on 3 of 6 subdomains. Conclusion: Data indicate that older CI listeners performed more poorly than younger CI listeners, although group differences appear to be task specific.Communication Sciences and Disorder