The Gaps between Knowing and Doing in Hearing Aid Fitting Management

Evidence based practice has become an important aspect in many healthcare provisions to improve patient outcomes. Investigating the gaps between knowing and doing in audiology practice will provide future directions for successful service delivery. The purpose of this study was to explore “know-do” gaps related to professional awareness and attitude in hearing aid fitting management (HAFM) by analyzing data of a questionnaire. It consisted of 22 questions focusing on 11 HAFM components. Each component had two sub-questions involving levels of the importance and practice for HAFM. Respondents answered each question based on subjective judgments for their own hearing aid fitting services with a Visual Analogue Scale. A total of 51 responses from hearing care professionals were collected and the scores for knowing and doing were compared. The results showed overall high scores in doing and knowing responses; however, there were significant “know-do” gaps demonstrating higher knowing scores than doing scores across all HAFM components. The largest “know-do” gaps were observed in three components mostly implemented during follow-up sessions which indicate the need to improve their corresponding services and practical guidelines emphasizing the follow-up services.

The Band-Importance Function for the Korean Standard Sentence Lists for Adults

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: The band-importance function (BIF) refers to a value characterizing the relative importance of different frequencies to speech intelligibility. The purpose of this study was to derive the BIF for the Korean standard sentence lists for adults (KS-SL-A). SUBJECTS AND METHODS: In this study, sentences from the KS-SL-A were used as the speech material. Twenty-six normal-hearing Korean listeners participated and intelligibility scores in 8 filters with 3 signal-to-noise ratio conditions were obtained. Based on the intelligibility score percentages, the BIF for the KS-SL-A was derived by using an established protocol. RESULTS: Band-importance weights varied across frequency bands. The most important frequency region was around 316 Hz (20.0%), and the importance of the frequency bands below the center frequency (CF) of 1,778 Hz was 59.6%. Therefore, low frequencies below the CF of 1,778 Hz were more important than high frequencies above the CF of 1,778 Hz. CONCLUSIONS: The BIF for KS-SL-A could be applied towards developing a hearing aid fitting formulae for Korean listeners.