Understanding outside factors that keep people from accessing our services can help pediatric audiologists more effectively provide hearing health care to all patients. The latest forum in Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups can help you recognize existing health care disparities as well as how you can work to mitigate them in your practice.

Pediatric Hearing Health Care Disparities

The barriers that families face to accessing health care can start as early as infancy. The forum opens with an article by Warner-Czyz and colleagues showing how population, socioeconomic, and demographic factors influence Early Hearing Detection and Intervention (EHDI) follow-through. The authors highlight how audiologists can help increase patient follow-up and recommend further research directions.

Similarly, Richlin et al. begin their article with a focus on the barriers that families face following the newborn hearing screening, including health literacy and proximity to care. The second half of this article presents clinicians with opportunities to change, focusing specifically on telehealth options and the importance of increasing the readability of the materials that audiologists give to families.

In the final article of the forum, Sprouse highlights the health disparities that children and families who have experienced trauma face. The author emphasizes that audiologists be trained to provide a trauma-informed approach and learn the signs, symptoms, and risks of secondary traumatic stress.

More From Perspectives

We’d like to thank Editor Cynthia Richburg for putting together this forum on behalf of Special Interest Group (SIG) 9: Pediatric Hearing and Hearing Disorders. We hope that this forum has shed some light on pediatric hearing disparities while also inspiring you to address these problems head-on in your practice.

If you enjoyed this forum, Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups provides readers with more than 100 clinically focused articles a year; these articles aim to bridge the gap between research and practice. Perspectives is free for affiliates of any of ASHA’s 20 SIGs, which cover topics and workplace settings across the sciences.

To learn more about nonmedical variables that affect health and access to health care, be sure to visit our latest Special Collection on Social Determinants of Health. The collection contains another article from SIG 9 reviewing the current evidence on barriers to equity in pediatric hearing health care.

Breaking down barriers and mitigating health care disparities is a group effort, and this forum can help ASHA’s audiologists do their part. You can read the entire forum in the latest issue of Perspectives, or explore the individual articles below.

Explore The Forum

Richlin, B. C., Blaiser, K. M., & Bush, M. (2024). Living in the void between hearing health care encounters: Evaluation of the barriers families face. Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups, 9(2), 372–385. https://doi.org/10.1044/2023_PERSP-23-00038

Sprouse, B. J. (2024). Advancing clinical decision making through trauma-informed care in pediatric hearing health care. Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups, 9(2), 386–392. https://doi.org/10.1044/2023_PERSP-23-00058

Warner-Czyz, A. D., Crow, S., Gohmert, A., Williams, S., & Romero, M. (2024). Barriers to follow-up in early hearing detection and intervention programs. Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups, 9(2), 355–371. https://doi.org/10.1044/2023_PERSP-23-00080