Are you looking for an outcome measure to monitor and track listening skills for children with hearing loss? Do you work with children developing listening skills, or children using hearing aids and/or cochlear implants?
Access to sound is a critical precursor for a child’s development of spoken language through listening. The Functional Listening Index-Paediatric (FLI-P) is a research validated tool for children from birth to six years of age that tracks listening skill progress to help predict outcomes and inform early decisions in hearing healthcare. Use of the FLI-P can support clinicians working with children with hearing loss to build a longitudinal view of a child’s functional listening in their real-world environments, and helps to bridge the gap between hearing assessment, audibility levels, hearing aid and cochlear implant programming and language outcomes.
What is the FLI-P
The Functional Listening Index-Paediatric (FLI-P) is a tool developed through clinical research conducted by the HEARing CRC and The Shepherd Centre with the support of Cochlear. It tracks listening skill development from birth to six years of age through a 64 item questionnaire grouped into six phases, across early listening to advanced listening skills.
The FLI-P can be used regularly by hearing healthcare professionals, in collaboration with families, and acquired skills checked off during each use. Progress over time can be monitored for individual children through evaluation of acquired items charted against a child’s chronological age.
The digital FLI-P, available through HearHub, can be used to calculate a child’s current functioning alongside previous entries to view the child’s listening development over time. This can be viewed with the comparative normative data within the digital tool to support families and hearing health care professionals to make data informed decisions to support a child’s outcomes.
The FLI-P has been used clinically for children with all levels and types of hearing loss, including unilateral and bilateral hearing loss, those diagnosed through newborn hearing screening and those diagnosed later, children learning English as both a primary and additional language, and languages other than English, and children with additional needs. The FLI-P has been used to clinically to monitor and track progress for children using a range of hearing devices, including hearing aids, cochlear implants, bone conductor hearing devices. It is intended for use with any child developing listening skills.
A publication on the feasibility study of the FLI-P can be found here: The Feasibility of the Functional Listening Index-Paediatric (FLI-P®) for Young Children with Hearing Loss – PubMed (nih.gov)
Want to learn more?
You can download our free FLI-P printables. HearHub subscriptions are also available and can be operating in just 48 business hours. View our subscription plans.
To find out more about how HearHub can benefit you and your team, book a 30-minute session with our friendly team today.
