Special Hearing Screener needed at the Orphanage.
I received an email today from Susan Westwood, the RN in charge of the nursery. For years, some of our babies have had repeated ear infections from a variety of causes, but we know that it has affected their hearing. We have no way of checking hearing on children under the age of 4. Most pediatricians in Haiti send children to the Dominican Republic for hearing testing when they think there is a problem.
Susan told me about a baby we have in the NICU who is 4 months old and doesn’t respond to noise at all. There are others that only respond to loud noises. We would like to be able to test their hearing.
Susan found a portable machine that is able to test hearing on infants. This machine is called a Welch Allyn OAE Hearing Screener. This machine is easy to operate and does not require a lot of training. The results are fast and accurate and take only about 10 seconds per ear. We can get accurate results without any response from the baby, and the machine gives us either a pass or fail result.
This would help us test the children’s hearing, and identify children that might benefit from hearing aids. It would also be good to be able to monitor our children who have chronic ear infections.
We need $4000 to buy the machine, printer, and supplies needed to make it run. I think it would be nice if we are able to use this machine to do screening of all of the school children that are sponsored through GLA and children living around the orphanage. But to reach out and be able to do this, we need help to raise the funds needed to buy the hearing screener. Can you help?
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