The process of treating adults and children with hearing loss who have previous hearing abilities is called Rehabilitation.
The process of managing an adult or a child who has lost some of their hearing after acquiring speech and language skills is known as rehabilitation.
What Is Rehabilitation?
In the context of managing hearing loss, Rehabilitation refers to a wide range of services, therapies and treatments that hearing health professionals, such as audiologists, audiometrists and speech pathologists use to assist people in managing their hearing loss and improving their communication abilities.
This is usually an ongoing process that involves the individual with hearing loss and their partner and/or family coming into regular contact with hearing health professionals.
Depending on an individual’s unique hearing loss, a hearing health professional can help with:
- Having an initial hearing loss assessments;
- Finding out if there is a surgical or medical solution;
- The fitting of Hearing Aids and/or other hearing technologies;
- Recommending what Assistive Listening Devices to use around the home or workplace;
- Maximising communication opportunities and outcomes;
- How to use and maintain Hearing Aids; and
- Helping hearing-impaired children acquire communication and language.
How often you visit an audiologist, audiometrist or speech pathologist often depends on the age of the person affected and when the hearing loss was acquired; particularly if it occurred before the development of language and communication skills during childhood.
Use HEARnet Online’s Find a Hearing Clinic Page to help find a hearing health professional in your suburb, town or region.