Assessment of a Hearing Aid Training Program for Health Care Workers.

Purpose: The purpose of the present study was to develop and evaluate an in-person hearing aid training program designed for health care workers and personal care aides (PCAs) who care for older adults.

Method: Participants were 18 health care workers and PCAs whose clients were older adults. This was a randomized controlled study in which half of the participants were assigned to the experimental group (n = 9) and the other half to a control group (n = 9). The experimental group was administered a hearing aid training program that was developed in this study for health care workers and PCAs. Participants in the control group were trained on a task similar in complexity and administration time to the hearing aid training program. The Practical Hearing Aid Skills Test-Revised Version 2 (PHAST-Rv2) was administered before and immediately after training. A 2 × 2 mixed analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to compare the pre- and post-training scores between and within the experimental and control groups. Descriptive statistics were used to examine the differences between pre- and post-training scores on each of the administered PHAST-Rv2 tasks. In addition, participants were asked about their experience helping clients with their hearing aids.

Results: Mean pre- and post-training PHAST-Rv2 scores for the experimental group were 59.50% and 95.84%, respectively, and 57.66% and 59.96%, respectively, for the control group. Results from a 2 × 2 mixed ANOVA with time point (pre- and post-training) as the within-subject variable and group (experimental and control) as the between-subject variable demonstrated that hearing aid training significantly improved PHAST-Rv2 scores for the experimental group. Post-training, the tasks that the experimental group improved on the most were brushing the microphone port, cleaning the dome, placing the hearing aids in the charger, and inserting the hearing aid into the model ear. No demographic variables were significantly correlated with the participants' improvement on the PHAST-Rv2 post-training score.

Conclusion: A hearing aid training program designed specifically for health care workers was shown to be an efficient and effective way to improve how well health care workers can care for and operate a hearing aid.