Healthy ears at the Special Olympics
August 2005Staff and students from the School's audiology and speech and language therapy programmes participated in the first-ever Healthy Hearing screening programme at the Special Olympics in Glasgow.
People with learning disabilities often have reduced access to health services and the Healthy Athletes programme, which runs parallel to the Special Olympics, highlights some of the problems facing this group.
The team wanted to educate the professional community about the health needs of people with intellectual and development disabilities. The implications of sensory loss may seriously affect their quality of life but often this loss can go unnoticed by carers, or becomes confused with behavioural difficulties.
996 athletes completed the screen and 34 per cent were found to have a significant hearing loss. The majority of athletes had mild to moderate sensori-neural hearing loss, for which treatment is often as simple as better management of ear wax. However, a number had profound and severe hearing losses which had gone apparently unnoticed by carers.
Many coaches noted that hearing loss explained behaviour that had been thought of as being part of the learning disability.
The team advised athletes who were found to be suffering from significant hearing loss about follow-up care and 235 athletes were referred to an audiological clinic for follow-up treatment.
Temporary hearing loss affecting those with intellectual disabilities may have a bigger impact on their experience than it does on others. Individuals without these disabilities are able to compensate through other senses and make conceptual guesses.
With little thought being given to the possibility of hearing loss, despite the higher incidence of sensory loss among this population, the challenge is to encourage carers and residential facilities to take this seriously and ensure all people have access to hearing assessments and follow-up.
