NIU Audiology Students Provide Free Hearing Services Around the World
By King Chung, Ph.D., CCC-A, NIU Professor of Audiology
World Hearing Day is on March 3 – a day dedicated to raising awareness about deafness and hearing loss. To celebrate, we asked some folks from NIU Audiology to share a little bit about the work they’re doing to make a difference at home and abroad.
Audiology is an exciting profession. We get to use our expertise to serve children and adults in different work settings. As the world’s population ages and many countries do not offer audiology training programs, our services are in great demand both in the U.S. and in the world. According to the World Health Organization, 1.5 billion people are living with some degree of hearing loss (WHO, 2021).
The Doctor of Audiology program at NIU provides many opportunities for students to serve the local and global communities. Since 2010, NIU students and faculty have provided free hearing services in 12 trips to eight different countries/governing regions. We have served aboriginal children in Australia; children and adults in Brazil, Cambodia, China, and the Dominican Republic; children and adults with special needs in Hong Kong and Taiwan; Polish children and adults and Ukrainian refugees in Poland. Most of the individuals we tested had never had a hearing test in their lives.
As identification always precedes intervention, we collaborate with local school, universities, and non-profit organizations to identify those with ear and hearing disorders. Our local collaborating organizations then provide follow-up services. After each trip, we write up papers to discuss the visiting countries’ audiology education systems, their audiology service systems, and our clinical findings. The long-term goals are to disseminate the hearing status of the served populations, to raise the awareness of their hearing service needs, and to facilitate better hearing services.
In the most recent trip to Poland, we tested ~350 Polish children and adults and ~150 Ukrainian refugees during the Thanksgiving break in 2022. As the Polish public health system provides free hearing services to its citizens and the Ukrainian refugees enjoy the same services while they are in Poland, we referred the children and adults with ear and hearing disorders to seek help in the public health system. During the process, we also found 70 Ukrainian refugees have aidable hearing loss in one or both ears and ~30% of the hearing loss was war related. The Polish public health system, however, does not provide free hearing aids.
The 2017 Lancet Commission reported that untreated hearing loss in mid-life is related to a 9% increase in the risk for dementia later in life (Livingston et al., 2021) and a recent study by Yeo (2022) found that the use of hearing aids/cochlear implants is associated with 19% decrease in cognitive decline or dementia. After coming back to the U.S., our team launched a campaign to raise the awareness of the hearing care needs of the Ukrainian refugees, and we have successfully solicited rechargeable hearing aids for all the refugees with aidable hearing loss. Our team is going back to Poland to fit the hearing aids in March 2023, and another team will go back in June to provide follow-up services.
As the faculty leader, I hope the hearing aids will alleviate the negative effects of hearing loss on the daily lives of the Ukrainian refugees and, through this experience, students will become future humanitarians to serve others in need in other parts of the world throughout their career.
