DHICE Deaf and Hearing Impaired Children Europe 2005

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Sponsors

Gold

Cochlear

Silver

Advanced Bionics

Bronze

  • Phonak
  • Medel
  • Oticon
  • Vismail

Supporters

  • Destiny of a Child
  • Early Support
  • Presence Multimedia

Designing quality hearing services for children

Friday May 13th 2005, 4:00pm — 4:30pm

Prof. René Dauman

Assessing quality of services for the hearing-impaired child is both challenging and necessary. Its first attribute, to be difficult, stems from technical, methodological and ethical considerations. Technical advances in many areas of paediatric audiology such as neonatal screening equipment, frequency-specific auditory evoked potentials, or hearing aid flexibility are occurring fast and need to be validated in young children before being included in the list of quality requirements. Methodological difficulties appear in the design of well-controlled studies on a specific communication tool, such as sign language or cued speech. Furthermore, taking account of parents’ expectations in the design of prospective studies is not an easy task. Ethical difficulties are encountered when trying to conciliate usually recommended procedures in medicine such as randomization and the legitimate choice of the parents. Despite these theoretical and practical impediments, establishing criteria of quality services for the hearing-impaired child is medically and economically necessary. Medically, at an individual level, the hearing-impaired child has greater chances of successful future life if he receives well-adapted services. Economically, criteria of quality services are needed to allocate health-care resources with efficiency and fairness.

The second part of the talk will be dedicated to discussing parental issues that already exist in France or are expected to appear within the forthcoming years. These issues concern: (1) the changes in professional skills after neonatal screening; (2) the principle and timing of bilateral cochlear implantation; (3) the adaptation of schools for the deaf to changes in the society; (4) the specific problem of managing associated handicaps in young children.

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