20Q With Gus Mueller CEU Courses

The importance of having a balance of knowledge and information in clinical practice. A review of anosognosia and how to counsel patients with this symptom is also discussed.

Newborn hearing screening brochures are provided to families around the time of the hearing screening and contain information about the screening, the results, and potential next steps. This article describes the results of a study investigating the suitability of current newborn hearing screening brochures, in addition to a study investigating the likelihood that someone would understand a ‘refer’ screening result. These studies reveal that many current newborn hearing screening brochures could be revised to make the information more accessible to families and that the use of the word ‘refer’ to describe a hearing screening result should be avoided because it is potentially confusing to most people.

This article covers the ins and outs of what we now know about OTC hearing aid products. Including an overview of the technology, gain and output limitations, and whether they are self-fitting or not? Further discussion if FDA 510(k) is required? Where will they be sold? Return for credit allowed? How do they relate to state dispensing laws? And much more.

This article describes bone conduction hearing devices (BCHD), who are candidates, and how to fit and verify them using current clinical tools for both adults and children. Differences between percutaneous and transcutaneous BCHDs and the impacts on our clinical procedures are explained. Ongoing research to inform future clinical directions is also provided.

How do you know if you are working hard enough, or too hard? Is your clinic’s workload similar to others in your region? Productivity measures can help answer these questions. This article describes how a group of pediatric audiology clinic directors developed a way to calculate productivity in their programs and the challenges they faced along the way.

This article covers the innovation occurring within today’s hearing aids and consumer hearables, and highlights the key differences between the two product sets. In addition, the role of consumer hearables in helping to combat the “7-10-year gap” and ways that the hearing health value proposition might be enhanced in the coming years is explored.

Why audiologists should include vestibular-balance neurodiagnostics in their practices, and considerations for getting starting such as selecting a test battery, establishing referral sources, training, and more.

Hearing impairment in the extended high frequencies (EHFs) can occur in the presence of a normal audiogram. This 20Q reviews the current knowledge on EHF hearing impairment and the usefulness of EHF audiometry in the clinic.

Children with hearing loss must have full-time access to speech and environmental sounds to optimize their listening and spoken language development. This 20Q summarizes the research that examines hearing technology wear time in children and its effect on outcomes. Highlights include research that examines the relationship between wear time and outcomes, and a review of factors that influence wear time. Additionally, numerous clinical tips are provided for optimizing hearing-technology wear time in children with hearing loss.

This course reviews recent literature on occupational stress in audiology, discusses the need for additional research in this area, and describes ways in which audiologists may want to approach stress reduction within the profession.