Do Audiologists React Well to Change?

By Diana C. Emanuel and Jessica Wince 

This article is a part of the March/April 2024, Volume 36, Number 2, Audiology Today issue.

Audiologists as a group are among the most resistant to change of any people that I’ve met.” This quote from a participant in a recent interview study of U.S. audiologists (Emanuel, 2021) was a commonly expressed sentiment across all participants (n = 30, representing diverse work settings and experience) in response to the following question: Do you think audiologists, as a whole, react well to change? Overall, about 60 percent of the participants said “no,” and only one participant said “yes” (FIGURE 1). In contrast to the tendency of participants to view their fellow audiologists as resistant to change, when participants talked about themselves, most described substantive recent changes they made to their clinical practice, including providing and marketing concierge services, enhancing patient education and counseling, creating new clinical services, shifting career focus into specialty areas of care, changing service delivery models, and raising awareness of hearing-health care. Overall, Emanuel (2021) observed that most audiologists had introduced practice changes in response to changes in hearing-health care; however, they perceived that other audiologists were not receptive to change.