By Trent Westrick, Leah Sherwood, and Alyse Gulack
This article is a part of the November/December 2021, Volume 33, Number 6, Audiology Today issue.
It is estimated that more than half of the 800,000 older adults residing in assisted-living facilities in the United States are older than age 85 (American Health Care Association, 2020) and an estimated 70 percent to 90 percent of these residents have some degree of hearing impairment (Cohen-Mansfield et al, 2004).
During visits to these assisted-living facilities, audiology graduate students gained supervised clinical practicum experience working with older adults.
There is limited concrete data on the number of nursing-home residents with objective hearing impairment and some studies suggest an under-reporting of hearing loss in this population (McCreedy et al, 2018). Despite a high estimated prevalence of hearing loss among residents in assisted-living facilities, an understanding among staff members of hearing loss and its related effects in these facilities appears to be somewhat limited (Solheim et al, 2016).
More than 453,000 employees work in assisted-living facilities in the United States (National Center for Assisted Living, 2019). Some assisted-living staff members are licensed health-care professionals, such as registered nurses or state-certified administrators, while other staff members and caregivers may have limited or varied formal health-care education and training, depending on individual state requirements (Mollot et al, 2018). Although assisted-living facilities often partner with outside entities to provide specific health-care services to residents, including audiology services, there appears to be limited hearing-health-care-focused training and education provided to assisted-living staff (Solheim et al, 2016).
To provide caregiver and staff education for assisted-living-facility employees, a one-hour interactive training program was developed as part of a graduate-student service-based capstone project. Pacific University institutional review board (IRB) approval was obtained for the project.
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