AMDA Foundation - Foundation Study Shows Staff, Patients Are Responsible for Underuse of Hearing Aids in LTCFs

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Vol XII, Feb `05

Foundation Study Shows Staff, Patients Are Responsible for Underuse of Hearing Aids in LTCFs

Vol XII, Feb `05

Despite national statistics suggesting that as many as 90% of nursing facility patients have significant hearing loss, NF staff often fail to recognize hearing impairments and/or don't help patients maintain or use their hearing aids. At the same time, patients who do have hearing aids often don't wear them because they don't know how to use them or the devices don't fit or work properly. These are the conclusions of a Foundation-sponsored study, "Critical Factors Associated with Hearing Aid Use in Nursing Home Residents," by Jiska Cohen-Mansfield, PhD, and Judith Taylor, MPhd. The researchers interviewed 279 resident-caregivers in a large mid-Atlantic nursing home. They obtained reports of hearing status and hearing aid use from multiple sources, including the Minimum Data Sets (MDS) and patient and caregiver interviews. As a result of inconsistent reporting and poor communication from one source to another, the researchers found that the number of patients reported to have hearing loss ranged from 26 to 175. They also uncovered several barriers to effective hearing aid use, including:

Malfunctioning devices
Poor fit
Lack of evaluation
Prohibitive cost
Intolerance
Lost devices

According to Cohen-Mansfield and Taylor, the findings suggest that several factors affect auditory screening and hearing aid use and that an effective quality improvement process, coupled with clear policies, can increase identification of patients with hearing impairments and improve the use of appropriate aid devices. Read the paper based on this study in the September-October 2004 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Directors Association.