Vinaya Manchaiah Presents Research on Patient Journey

By Timothy Cooke

Ida Fellow Vinaya K.C. Manchaiah successfully defended his PhD research on the patient journey, hearing disability acceptance, and the stages-of-change approach at the Swedish Institute for Disability Research (SIDR) at Linköping University on 25 October 2013.

Vinaya has been instrumental in conducting research on the concepts, themes, and application of the Ida Institute’s tools and methods. Among other topics, his dissertation explored the concepts and themes introduced by the Ida Institute’s Patient Journey and Communication Partner Journey tools.

Vinaya’s participation in the Ida seminar series on Communication Partners inspired him to pursue this research topic. After the seminar, on his flight back to the United Kingdom, Vinaya happened to sit next to late Professor Dafydd Stephens, who was a faculty member on the seminar series. Their discussion that day led to a collaborative research partnership that produced a set of multiple studies related to the patient journey.

The Ida Institute developed the Patient Journey and Communication Partner Journey models based on the input and perspectives of the 75 hearing care professionals who attended our seminar series. In his research with Dafydd Stephens, Vinaya aimed to take these models and to validate their findings by applying qualitative and quantitative research methods to acquire the patient’s perspective. This involved conducting interviews and focus groups with hearing impaired persons and communication partners to further explore their perspectives on the process of change and their journey with hearing loss.

Vinaya’s research found that the Ida Institute’s patient journey models based on the professionals’ perspective were very similar to those models ascertained by considering patient and communication partner perspectives.

Among the many recommendations in his PhD dissertation, Vinaya found that while the models can be helpful in uncovering important information about the process of change for patients and families, the models do not adequately capture the intensity of emotions that each person experiences at each stage of the patient journey. For this reason, Vinaya suggests that it may be valuable to incorporate outcome measurements at different stages of the journey to better understand the patient experience.

We invite you to explore Vinaya’s complete recommendations and findings by downloading his thesis.

Vinaya K. C. Manchaiah is currently a Senior Lecturer in Audiology at the Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England. He is involved in numerous external activities, including acting as the co-founder and president of the nonprofit organization “Audiology India,” which aims to develop a collaborative forum for knowledge sharing among hearing care professionals in India.