Person-Centered Care

Fluff, Fact or Fiction?

During Ida Institute seminars and workshops, and conversations at professional meetings, many audiologists have expressed that person-centered care is a fluffy, intangible, time-consuming add-on to their current practice.

Others have expressed a need for more facts, i.e. knowledge about counseling and communication skills to adopt a person-centered approach in their clinical practice.

Still others feel that focusing on the human dynamics of hearing loss may take them into a land of fiction or unchartered territory. It may be beyond their scope of practice or may present a challenge to their role as a hearing care professional.

Seminar Topic

This seminar series explored the relationships among language, identity, and person-centeredness.

Some questions we considered include:

  • What does being person-centered mean to us and to our clients?
     
  • What challenges do we experience during the clinical encounter when managing clients in a holistic manner and addressing the human dynamics of hearing loss?
     
  • What underlying skills or practical tools do we need to anchor person-centeredness in our daily practice?

We explored together with our faculty of subject matter experts and participants the challenges we experience in anchoring person-centered care in daily practice and looked for a way forward for integrating it into our practice.

Faculty Members

Each seminar series, we collaborate with a Faculty made up of subject matter experts. The experts come primarily from academia, but can also have a range of different backgrounds and experiences. Before the series, the Faculty explores the topic and provides input into the seminar series plan. During the seminars, the Faculty give lectures in their area of expertise and actively participate in the collaborative process. Here, our faculty members talk about why they believe this seminar ‘Person-Centered Care: Fluff, Fact or Fiction’, is an important topic to discuss, and what it means to them in their daily practice.  

Lesley Jones

Lesley Jones, Ph.D., is the Senior Lecturer in Social Science at the Hull York Medical School, University of York. She has conducted qualitative research in deafness and hearing impairment, including ethnicity and narrative based medicine. 

Jones served as an Ida faculty member for our Living Well with Hearing Loss seminar series. In addition, she has contributed significantly to a new Ida tool that will provide educators of audiology students a new, interactive method to teach communication skills for the client interview. 

Sophia Kramer

Sophia E. Kramer, PhD, is a (neuro) psychologist/ senior researcher at the department of ENT/Audiology, EMGO Institute for Health and Care Research at the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam. She also serves on the Ida Advisory Board. Her major research interests are in the psychological and societal effects of hearing loss in adults, listening effort, adult aural rehabilitation and outcomes assessment.

She is involved in various national and international research projects and has published papers, a book and book chapters on psychosocial- and occupational aspects of hearing impairment, effort in hearing and (self-report) methods of assessment. Kramer is vice president of the International Collegium or Rehabilitative Audiology and serves as editorial board member of the International Journal of Qualitative Studies of Health and Wellbeing and Trends in Amplification.

Joseph Montano

Joseph Montano, Ed.D., is Chief of Audiology and Speech Language Pathology at New York Presbyterian Hospital-Weill Cornell Medical Center. Montano is a member of the Ida Advisory Board and also served as a faculty member during the Living Well with Hearing Loss seminar series. 

Prior to starting his position at Weill Cornell, Montano served as an Associate Professor at Long Island University/C.W. Post, and for 17 years was Director of the Department of Communication Disorders at Manhattan Eye, Ear, and Throat Hospital. Montano's clinical expertise is in the area of audiologic rehabilitation with particular interest in adjustment to adult onset hearing loss, hearing assistive technology systems and hearing aids. 

Sue Ann Erdman

Sue Ann Erdman, MA, CCC-A, serves as the Director of ARCCS. Her career in rehabilitative audiology includes experience as a clinician, researcher, and graduate instructor. She spent over ten years in the aural rehabilitation program at Walter Reed Army Medical Center where she was co-developer of the CPHI and served on the VA's hearing aid selection committee. Her areas of expertise include counseling individuals with hearing impairment and members of their families, psychosocial adjustment to hearing loss, and self-assessment of communication and adjustment problems experienced secondary to hearing loss.

An ASHA Fellow and Editor of Perspectives on AR and Its Instrumentation, she is also a past-president of the Academy of Rehabilitative Audiology. Her publications include several chapters on counseling adults with hearing impairment and numerous articles in the areas of self-assessment, binaural amplification, and group approaches to counseling in AR.