Ida Institute learning specialist Ena Nielsen, PhD., presented the “Emotional Brain and the Ida Motivation Tools” at the 2012 Oticon Symposium held in Hamburg, Germany, on 19 September. The symposium invited researchers from across Europe to discuss new research regarding the brain, cognition, and hearing. Ena Nielsen joined presenters from the Jean-Uhrmacher-Institute at the University of Cologne, the Max-Planck-Institute for Cognition and Neuroscience in Leipzig, and the Carl von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg.
Ena Nielsen focused her presentation on the emotional brain, exploring how emotions, information from friends and family, and past experiences can all contribute to and affect a patient’s decision making process when contemplating whether to take action on their hearing loss.
“A large number of hearing care professionals tend to believe that once they present an audiogram to a patient that validates the hearing loss, the patient will decide to take action and acquire hearing aids,” states Ena Nielsen. “This is not, however, how people make decisions. Feelings, past experiences, and information received from friends, colleagues, and the Internet may all play a role in the patient’s decision making process.”
In the presentation, Ena Nielsen explored how clinicians can take steps to better understand a patient’s decision-making process. If a patient fails to follow clinical recommendations, most clinicians believe that the patient either did not understand what was said or that they forgot what the recommendation was in the first place. Research shows, however, that this is not true for most patients. When patients fail to act on clinical suggestions, it is often a conscious decision to act contrary to what was recommended. It is not because they did not understand or forgot what they heard. Most patients make rational decisions about their treatment and their lifestyle in the context of their values, their daily life, and their preferences. The information that a patient uses as a basis for their decision-making, which may include many factors, is often very different from what is presented to the hearing care professionals.
“This new understanding of the patient’s decision-making process calls for a new partnership between the patient and the audiologist. It is important for hearing care professionals to actively listen to the patient’s story. By doing so, one can acquire important information about the factors that may influence a patient’s decision making process,” states Ena Nielsen. “Not only that, listening to the patient’s story can help increase the motivation of patients to act on advice. Research in the area of headaches shows that the best predictor of successful pain release after the first appointment with a doctor is that patients felt that the doctor listened to their story completely and allowed them to freely voice their concerns. We can assume that this would also apply to individuals with hearing loss.”
Ena Nielsen concluded the presentation illustrating how the Ida Institute’s Motivation Tools can help hearing care professionals open a valuable dialogue with the patient and assess their motivation to take action on their hearing loss.
“When you understand and take the time to listen to the patient’s story, you receive the information that you need about the patient to make a shared rehabilitation plan where the patient is involved and therefore motivated to comply” concludes Ena Nielsen. “The Ida Motivation Tools can help hearing care professionals open a structured conversation with the patient to better understand what drives their need for change.”
To learn more about this area of research, please feel free to contact Ena Nielsen.