Four-year-old Nicole Rooney is among the newer generation of children in Ireland who have benefited from the universal newborn hearing screening programme that was introduced eight years ago. She had hearing loss in both ears, which was classed initially as “mild to moderate”. Nicole was fitted with hearing aids right away but her hearing loss was not “bad enough”, says Alyson, to get cochlear implants. “The problem I have is that primary care speech therapy in the HSE is only for hearing children,” she says. Then she heard about audio verbal therapy (AVT), a specialism in working with children with hearing loss.

Source: The Irish Times April 28, 2021 04:52 UTC