Assessment, tracking and monitoring progress is essential for effective hearing healthcare. Beyond this, close collaboration with all stakeholders involved in the hearing journey helps to achieve more positive results.
Hearing healthcare professionals and educators need to identify critical focus areas as they track a child’s access to sound and support the development of the child’s listening and spoken communication skills.
Working closely with parents to monitor their child’s progress and identify goals tailored to the child’s needs is an important part of paediatric intervention. It helps parents make informed decisions about their child’s future development.
Drawing from our 50+ years of experience in clinical program delivery and research, The Shepherd Centre developed HearHub. It is a web-based platform that provides hearing health professionals with innovative tools and programs to enhance how they work with children in developing their listening and spoken communication skills.
Designed by hearing health professionals for hearing health professionals, it better equips clinicians to track a child’s progress and inform parents how they can further their child’s listening, language, and spoken communication skills as they grow.
Improved access to hearing health services
As a digital application, professionals can take HearHub tools anywhere with an internet connection, supporting in-clinic, home or school-based appointments. This improves the accessibility of early intervention hearing health programs to families who don’t live close to a clinical centre.
According to a 2021 Hearing Australia Review, only 58% of children in Australia who were born deaf or with hearing loss received specialist early intervention support. It’s important all children with hearing loss receive specialist early intervention support so they can reach their full potential.
Widening access to hearing health services helps create a world of opportunity.
Monitor end-to-end client progress
Data provides a clear pathway for clinicians to benchmark developmental progress in children and to clearly communicate results to parents. To help clinicians harness the capabilities of data in their practice, our HearHub platform contains two digital tools: FLI-P® and REDDI.
- FLI-P®: The FLI-P® (Functional Listening Index– Paediatric®) tool tracks a child’s functional listening skills from birth through to age six. This tool can be used to set development goals for children, discern areas of concern and monitor trends in progress over time. This tool also comes complete with a variety of visual graphs so professionals can easily access information on the progress of the children on their caseload and readily communicate it to their parents.
- REDDI: The REDDI (Rapid Evaluation and Documentation of Detection and Imitation) tool tracks a child’s functional access to the critical sounds used in speech through detection and imitation. Results are recorded throughout a child’s listening journey and clinicians can then create a visual graph which displays both progress outcomes and areas that require further development. The REDDI tool encapsulates a daily picture of a child’s access to the sounds around them.
There is enormous potential in clinicians using both the FLI-P® and REDDI tools in their practice. It enables them to easily track patterns of progress over a given period and provide straightforward evidence to support parents in making decisions for their child’s future.
“HearHub’s FLI-P® tool has been great for helping monitor functional listening progress. It’s easy to use and understand, and the progress graph is great to show parents and other professionals to help validate success or further need for ongoing support.” – Aaron Henley, Speech Language Therapist, The Hearing House, NZ.
Empower children and families with education
Listening and spoken communication skill development isn’t contained solely within the sessions they have with their clinicians. Parents have a significant role in supporting their children to foster habits that enhance their development for life.
HearHub helps clinicians guide parents in supporting children outside of clinical sessions through the facilitator courses offered: Talk Together, Confident Kids and Ready Steady Think!.
- Talk Together is a parent education program. In this course, professionals learn how to help caregivers make decisions about their child’s listening and speaking journey through knowledge-sharing and connecting with other parents. It also comes complete with knowledge, activities, tools, videos, and downloadable parent information so professionals can deliver their own Talk Together Listening Foundations group program.
- Confident Kids programs are for both children and their parents. These programs can be delivered to several age ranges, including 1-2, 4-5 and 6-8 years. Age-based group programs help to identify delays in social and theory of mind skills. The Confident Kids programs help determine key focus areas and support each child as they grow and interact with peers and their community. These programs are also designed to train clinicians to facilitate their own Confident Kids programs. When clinicians facilitate these programs, children with hearing loss are empowered to navigate different social environments as well as build healthy interactive relationships.
- Ready Steady Think! programs are for both children and their parents. This program concentrates on imaginative play and emotional regulation in a supported group environment. It also aids in developing a child’s executive function skills. These skills are essential for success in all aspects of life as they involve controlling impulses, self-monitoring, and flexible thinking and planning. This program also equips clinicians with all the information and resources they need to deliver their own Ready Steady Think! program.
Hear from one of our pilot groups after running their own Confident Kids 4-5 Years program: “Trialling the Confident Kids program within our setting enabled staff to explore how to support Theory of Mind development in young children. The program provided a range of teaching experiences that could then be integrated throughout the day.”
These courses (accessed through HearHub) help clinicians save time by providing them with the necessary resources and frameworks to facilitate their own courses. This means clinicians can devote more time to doing what they do best – helping children with hearing loss to reach their full potential. Our courses help professionals to help others.
A streamlined user-experience
HearHub ensures children with hearing loss receive the support they need in a timely fashion. With streamlined tracking and monitoring of client data, our technology enables professionals to work closely with team members and easily access a client’s progress. This creates a seamless user-experience while minimising client disruption.
The goal of HearHub is to support clinicians to give children the best start to life by developing their listening and spoken communication skills. With the tools to educate parents and monitor their child’s progress at the click of a button, clinicians can deliver effective services more efficiently.
Hear what one of our clinicians had to say after subscribing to HearHub: “I now have the tools to support my work, and it has enabled me to become more efficient.”
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.
