School-Clinic Collaboration to Serve Students With Hearing Loss

Providing services to school-age children with hearing loss involves a host of professionals from  clinical and school settings, including audiologists, speech-language pathologists and teachers. No single professional can provide everything these children need to achieve optimal outcomes. It takes all of them working together with each other and the child’s parents. Toward this end, we created an innovative program for students with hearing loss at Arkansas Children’s Hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas. Like most children’s hospitals, we offer clinic-based audiology and speech-language pathology services to children from birth to 21 years of age. We also developed a program providing contracted, school-based audiology services and specialized assistance for school professionals working with students with hearing loss. Many of our school-based team members also work in the clinic. This gives us a comprehensive perspective on information and issues we need to share between clinic and school. We used these insights to develop tools that help us work more collaboratively toward helping each student reach their potential: Privacy and information sharing Although we all appreciate and understand the need for patient and student privacy, it creates challenges that can slow down or even stop the flow of information among professionals. Obtaining the appropriate releases of information (ROI) is a shared responsibility of clinic-based and school-based team members. A few ti...
Source: American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) Press Releases - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Tags: Academia & Research Audiology Health Care Schools Slider Speech-Language Pathology Hearing Assistive Technology hearing loss Source Type: blogs