A Big Thank You To Katie

In April we welcomed Katie to Kampala. Katie is an Audiologist from South Africa and is currently working in Ireland. She joined us for five weeks as a volunteer. Her main role was to help further develop our hearing assessment and hearing aid programme. This had been very much in its infancy because up to now we lacked some of the resources to progress any further. Prior to Katie’s visit we discussed the possibility of doing ear impressions for ear moulds. Katie brought the impression materials with her and we have now started to do ear impressions in our clinic. This now means that the only service we out source is the making of ear moulds. However in the future it is hoped we will be able to make our own moulds in a suitably equipped clinic so that we have a comprehensive streamlined hearing aid service.

During her five weeks Katie performed 53 hearing assessments on babies and children. She fitted hearing aids on 6 children and did 4 hearing aid reviews on children previously fitted with hearing aids. Many of the children she fitted with hearing aids were followed up before she left and all are making good progress and their level of hearing has improved

Katie also designed an educational brochure for parents called ‘Your child’s hearing’ to create awareness of the developmental milestones in terms of hearing, speech and language development.

She also did some training with the local Audiologists to make sure that they were happy and confident using the hearing aid programming software.

IHCC would like to thank Katie for all her enthusiasm, knowledge and energy she brought to the programme.