Dialogue and follow-up

Parental involvement during follow up visits

When fitting is completed and performance of the hearing aid has been verified, the real work for the children with hearing impairment and their families begins. During follow-up visits you can support these families and ensure that the children thrive with their hearing aids.

What might help to evaluate the outcome of the intervention is to utilise observations made by the parents.

Parental instruction 

Parental involvement during follow-up visits can be helpful. If parents are instructed, they can observe their child’s reactions to environmental sounds and speech sounds with the newly fitted hearing aids. Encouraging dialogue with parents will help them describe their observations in detail.

Dialogue can be useful

Such dialogue with parents may assist you in evaluating the child's auditory profile and help determine the need for re-adjustment and fine tuning of their hearing aids.

When working with older children, it is possible to instruct the child on how to evaluate the hearing aids’ performance in his/her typical surroundings. Older children may be able to explain their experiences and observations, and their parents may contribute to a whole picture.

Continuing care

Frequent follow-up visits are important, especially with infants for whom the threshold measures may be limited and/or unreliable. Parents must be prepared that new audiometric measures should be performed together with refitting of the hearing aids as the child matures.

Intervention is an ongoing process which requires continuing visits. It may be a good idea to prepare the parents that they play an important role. And that their explanations are useful in the evaluation of the outcome of the ongoing intervention.