Awareness of newborn hearing screening program

“When babies are born, parents are accustomed to counting fingers and toes and asking about vaccinations, but they also need to be educated to ask if their baby passed the hearing test,” says Dr. Melissa Pynnonen, the study’s lead author in an interview with Reuters Health. Pynnonen and her colleagues aimed to survey a representative group of Americans to assess parents’ recall of hearing screen at birth, hearing screening results, and recommendations for follow-up. To do this, they included 1,539 parent households in their survey. The mean age of the parents was 38.8 years and the mean age of the children 10.2 years. Results showed that only 62.9% of parents remembered a newborn hearing test, and for children with risk indicators for hearing loss (587 cases), only 68.6% of parents recalled a hearing screen. The main factors influencing parent recall were higher educational levels, younger age of the child, and the presence of any risk indicator for hearing...