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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Hearing and vision loss within residential care facilities
— the need for improved service delivery | | Author(s) | Mark C Flynn, Esther J Kennedy, Julianne Johns |
| Journal title | Australasian Journal on Ageing, vol 21.3, September 2002 |
| Pages | pp 141-151 |
| Keywords | Hearing Impairment ; Visual impairment ; Care homes ; Rehabilitation ; New Zealand. |
| Annotation | Functional assessments of speech understanding could provide a quick and simple assessment of the required level of assistance for each of the 178 residents participating in this New Zealand project. Despite 87.1% of the sample having a significant hearing impairment, only 43.3% currently wore hearing aids. Linked to poor hearing aid use was the fact that 43.9% of hearing aids required some degree of maintenance. Otoscopic examinations revealed 42.1% of ear canals to be occluded with cerumen to a degree that medical intervention was required. Sentence identification revealed the importance of aiding and access to contextual and visual cues (lip-reading) for this population. The study confirms the high prevalence of hearing impairment in older people, and makes a case for rehabilitation services being directed towards this population, particularly in the areas of hearing and maintenance, cerumen removal, and provision of communication skills training to residential care workers. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-030122209 A |
| Classmark | BV: BR: KW: LM: 7YN |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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