Author(s)
Vidhu Sharma, MS ENT DNB
Kapil Soni, MS, DNB, MNAMS
Amit Goyal, MS, DNB, MAMS, FACS
Affiliation(s)
All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Jodhpur;
Abstract:
Introduction: The current COVID-19 pandemic has posed unforeseen challenges, including sudden loss of or limited access to healthcare services. We share our experience of conducting unplanned remote tele-practice for pre-lingual hearing-impaired pediatric cochlear implantees in a resource constrained setting.
Methods: The study was conducted at a tertiary care centre in North-Western India, commencing from the period of nation-wide lockdown. Sixteen pre-lingual hearing impaired paediatric cochlear implantees were enrolled after taking informed tele-consent from the parents/caregiver. Tele-practice sessions were conducted by the parent under the supervision of the Speech Language Pathologist (SLP) via video-calls (or audio calls) employing home based activities. At the end of six weeks, the SLP administered a questionnaire via phone calls to ascertain the feedback and overall experience of the parents with tele-practice. Also, after 6 months of tele-practice, performance of the children was assessed using CAP score, IT-MAIS score and SIR score.
Results: The mean age of children was 4.48 years (16 months -13 years); 5 were male and 11, female. A majority of parents had a positive experience in terms of a better understanding of their child’s learning challenges (87.5%), feeling more involved in the child’s rehabilitation (93.8%) and willingness to recommend tele-practice to others (100%). Post tele-therapy performance scores (CAP and SIR) showed significant improvement while the improvement in the IT-MAIS score was not found to be statistically significant.
Conclusion: Implementing unplanned tele-practice posed a variety of challenges. for not only the child and parent, but for the SLP as well. The challenges we faced necessitated “out of the box” thinking on a situation-to-situation basis, yielding overall encouraging results.