We recently concluded the seminar series, Enabling Communication Partnerships and are excited about the tools and knowledge that have been developed in collaboration with more than 70 global participants.
We are pleased to launch these tools at the Audiology Now! Congress in April. The tools will be available at our exhibit and will be presented by Ida faculty Profs. Joseph Montano, PhD, Chief of Audiology and Speech Language Pathology at Cornell Medical Center and Jill Preminger, PhD, from University of Louisville, Kentucky; on April 17th. In May, these tools in PDF form will be downloadable from our website.
The Communication Partner Journey tool is designed to support the needs of communications partners at various stages along a patient’s journey of hearing loss. Similar to the Ida Institute’s Patient Journey tool, the interactive Communication Partner Journey template facilitates a better understanding of the wide range of reactions communication partners’ experience – information that can contribute to better understanding for patients within their own social environment.
The Communication Rings tool encourages people with hearing loss to consider how hearing loss might impact their relationships with people in their lives. In addition to helping patients identify the central and supporting players in their networks, the Communication Rings tool enables patients and their hearing care professionals formulate rehabilitation goals that maintain and strengthen essential communication channels.
The Goal Sharing for Partners strategy is a step-by-step questionnaire that assists people with hearing loss and their communication partners to acknowledge the hearing loss and the limitations and restrictions it places on each. By helping them to acknowledge that they are partners in communication, the GPS tool enables the partners to accept their shared responsibility to work together to improve communication, to establish realistic communication goals and to determine the steps necessary to achieve these goals.