Ida at the HLAA Conference

By Sharmi Albrechtsen

Earlier this month, the Ida Institute conducted a workshop with 30 members of the Hearing Loss Association of America (HLAA) at their annual conference in Washington. All of the members attending the workshop were hearing impaired.

Following the last seminar series,” Living Well with hearing Loss” the Ida Institute has developed a Living Well tool prototype designed to better understand the person with hearing loss within their social context, to hear the patient’s unique story and to formulate positive management strategies for different social situations together with the patient. This has been tried out in clinics.

Participants at the seminars felt that as this tool had some unique qualities, it was essential to obtain patients perspective on this. Participant Brenda Battat, executive director of HLAA offered the Ida Institute the opportunity to conduct a workshop at HLAA to gain some patient perspectives on the Living Well prototype tool.

The workshop was received favorably and the participants were enthusiastic about the aspects of the tool that would facilitate their telling their personal stories related hearing loss to the audiologist.

Development on the tool continues – also incorporating the feed-back from testing in clinic which has also been very positive.