The Institute is delighted to welcome visiting scholar Nerina Scarinci. Nerina currently teaches and researches at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, where her focus is family centered care. She has a speech pathology background and obtained her PhD from the University of Queensland.
Nerina has also been involved with Ida for years, participating in our Patient Centered Care: Fluff, Fact, or Fiction? seminar, and more recently our Tele-Health focus group. Below, she tells us a little more about what she’s working on while visiting Ida.
What brought you to the Ida Institute?
We’ve recently been successful in obtaining a large Oticon Foundation grant where we’re conducting a cohort-comparison study, looking at improving rehabilitation outcomes for older adults with hearing loss and their family members using a family centered care approach. The team is Christopher Lind from Flinder’s University, Louise Hickson, Carly Meyer, and myself from UQ, and Mel Gregory, from the Ida Institute. One of my big roles while I’m here as the visiting scholar is to start working on this project with Mel. The intervention is that we will work with audiology centers to deliver a family centered care aural rehab program. We’re not just going to train audiologists, we’re going to work with everybody to make sure that the entire care package is family-centered, from simple things like sending letters and over-the-phone reinforcing that a family member should attend with you and be prepared to participate in the program. The problem at the moment is sometimes they do write these letters and say bring someone along, but what happens is then that someone is ignored.
How will you do the training?
We’re going to be using a lot of Ida resources to do this. The framework that we’re going to be using is the Change Guide. We’re going to be talking about all the different Ida tools that you can use in a family centered care hearing healthcare program, such as the GPS, the Line, Communication Rings. One of my roles while I’m here is acknowledging the time barrier. We can’t get audiologists to use every single Ida tool in an appointment. One of my tasks is to see if we can integrate or streamline the tools such that it’s not so overwhelming for audiologists to use them. We don’t want them to see that family centered care has to be in addition to what they normally do, it is going to be what they do.
What other Ida projects will you be working on?
The Living Well tool is something that I’ll be looking at. I’ve been writing the chapter for the Living Well tool for the new Ida University Course. I’m looking at the clinical usability of it, and can we make it streamlined, can we integrate it with the other tools, can we make it online?
Do you have any other projects in Denmark?
I’m working with Ariane Laplante-Lévesque , Elisabeth Thorén and Claus Nielsen from the Eriksholm Research Centre on a range of projects. One of them involves evaluating online information that’s available for family members of children with hearing loss. Even though we think naturally that children with hearing loss and their families will receive family centered care, I did another project, where, actually, they’re not necessarily. The parents are there because they have to be there and rarely were the intervention needs of the family members addressed. We’re trying to build up an understanding of awareness of the needs of parents, grandparents, siblings, extended families of children with hearing loss.