Grant: Project Grant

Good communication between patients and healthcare providers is essential for quality health care. People with hearing loss are at high risk of adverse clinical outcomes resulting from miscommunication, unless providers and facilities are equipped with tools and strategies to facilitate communication with this population. Although good communication is important for all healthcare interactions, the hospital setting poses unique challenges. Hospitals are loud and healthcare providers are pressed for time. Also, being in hospital is unfamiliar and stressful for patients, who are often without social supports or their hearing devices. Tools and strategies are available that support communication with people with hearing loss; however, uptake of these tools in the hospital is typically low. To address these problems, a multidisciplinary team of hearing health professionals, hospital-based providers, people with hearing loss, researchers, healthcare decision makers, and community stakeholder groups formed to achieve the following goals. First, we will explore how hearing loss impacts patient-provider communication in hospital and potential opportunities to improve communication. Second, we will design a prototype bundle of different tools and strategies based on these findings. Third, we will pilot test this bundle across hospital units in Alberta to see if the intervention improved patient-provider communication among patients with hearing loss. We also want to learn how we should be delivering the bundle long term, so will measure how the tools and strategies were used and by whom, whether they were acceptable and feasible, and any other lessons that can guide future planning. This research will help us learn more about the challenges that people with hearing loss experience while in hospital and what we can do about it. We expect the lessons from our work will improve hospital care across Canada and internationally.