HAPEE Hearing Program

Hearing Assessment Program—Early Ears (HAPEE) program focusses on hearing loss in children aged 0-5 years.

The HAPEE program provides

• Diagnostic hearing assessments for children aged 0 - 6 years old
• Support for primary health staff to undertake initial hearing screening assessments at local health services.
• Activities to raise awareness about the importance of early identification of ear and hearing problems

The hearing assessment

The first step is to take a case history to check on overall health and ear health in particular, for example if the child has had any ear, nose or throat infections in the past.

This is followed by the Parent Evaluated Understanding Listening Measure (PLUM) and Hearing and Talking Scale (HATS). These assessments are based on asking a series of pre-determined questions to understand how children hear things at home.

This simple yarn is an opportunity to find out if the parent or carer has any hearing concerns and to check the child’s overall development and wellbeing. Therefore, it’s very important for parents or carers to be involved, not just teachers and/or health workers.

The PLUM questionnaire assesses a child’s perceived hearing ability and the HATS questionnaire assesses their perceived speaking ability. They can be used in combination to assess the child's overall communication skills.

The next step is a visual examination of the child’s ear by the health professional to check their ear health, for ear wax and any problems. This is done using an otoscope, a tool which shines a beam of light into the ear to help visualize and examine the condition of the ear canal and eardrum.

This is followed by a hearing test. The type of test will depend on the child’s age but may include playing games or some automatic tests. Some examples include:

• Transitory evoked otoacoustic emission (TEOAE): These are sounds emitted in response to an acoustic stimulus of very short duration; usually clicks but can be tone-bursts.
• PTA (Portable VROA or play audiometry): Visually Reinforced Orientation Audiometry and Play audiometry.