Hearing Program for the Dominican Republic

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Mission

Our team is dedicated to ensuring that all children in the Dominican Republic (DR) receive comprehensive, high quality hearing care.

Philosophy

In pursuit of our mission, we will set up a hearing program in the DR. Via a collaboration with the Chicagoland VA hospital system and the Rush audiology team, we are beginning to collect hearing aids that can be refurbished and refitted for children in the DR who are diagnosed with a hearing impairment.

Objectives and General Description

In the U.S., there is one audiologist for every 20,000 people. In contrast, there are a total of 6 audiologists in the Dominican Republic serving 10 million people (about half the population of New York). A team of ENT providers from Rush has been providing surgical services for over 10 years at a hospital in Peralta, in the rural Western region of the DR. In addition to the surgical services, we started a hearing program in Peralta about 5 years ago.

Presently, we have screened about 1,500 children ages newborn to 18 years. We have been able to train local health care workers to perform hearing screens. For the first time, we can provide free and available access for all newborns at the hospital in Peralta. Our efforts have allowed for hearing screens to be available for all children within the communities served by the Peralta hospital.

Our objectives include expanding the hearing services to other hospitals in the Western region of DR. The long-term objective is to provide free access and widespread availability of hearing screens for newborns and pediatric patients up to 18 years of age. We have also started to setup a hearing aid collection program whereby we leverage social media and collaborate with the Chicagoland VA hospitals, since the Veterans with hearing loss get access to free hearing aids every 3 years.