AAA celebrated the Best of Audiology

There was asmaller exhibition space but increasededucational content as the AmericanAcademy of Audiology looked to strike theright balance at their annual conference.

The American Academy of Audiology annualgathering opened its doors to thousands ofaudiologists, hearing aid dispensers, doctors,presenters, exhibitors and students in the lastfew days in March. Running from Wednesday27th until Saturday 30th March, the conferencewelcomes delegates from across North America and therest of the world to the Greater Columbus ConventionCentre in Columbus, Ohio.

Having celebrated 30 years of the AAA in 2018, it wastime to commemorate 30 years of conventions in 2019.The AAA celebrated with the ‘Best of Audiology’: four daysof education, networking and discovery across hundredsof learning labs, featured sessions, industry updates,exhibitor courses, research podiums, learning modules,student sessions and more than 200 posters. Add to that174 exhibitors spread across hundreds of thousands ofsquare feet of exhibit space and there truly is somethingfor everyone, whatever their audiology speciality.

Numbers have been fluctuating over the last few yearsat the AAA convention. Gone are the days when nearly7,000 people from the profession would mingle in the halls,meeting rooms and exhibition space. Delegate numbersfor this year appear to be around the 2,500 mark but thatis an estimate by attendees as official numbers have notbeen released. Despite being well-short of the delegatenumbers that attended the 2018 German Congress inHanover, the American team are still referring to their eventas the “world’s largest gathering of audiologists”.

Whilst we can fixate on the number of people in attendance,perhaps we should look more to the audiological contentof the event. From an education perspective the 2019convention featured more than 200 seminars and educationalopportunities: including 84 learning modules, 43 industryupdates, 27 research podiums, 22 student workshopsand events, 15 exhibitor courses, 9 featured sessions, 8industry novel technologies, 5 learning labs, 5 studentresearch forums and 4 mini modules which included atotal of 17 presentations! And then there were 203 Clinical,Research and Teaching posters for audiologists to readand digest. This is a phenomenal number of education andnetworking events and is in sharp contrast to the singletrackof presentations at the EUHA event.

It takes 10 months for the Program Committee to pulltogether the four-day education schedule that is designedto heighten clinical skills and enhance professional lives.Erin Miller, Program Chair, told Audio Infos: “Our goal isto meet the needs of professionals practising in differentsettings, with different populations and across the breadthof audiology.” The program committee, along with theProfessional Development Council, spent considerable time reviewing the sessions from previous conferenceswhilst assessing the current needs to AAA members in thecontext of an ever-changing audiology landscape.

The team also looked outside of America for inspiration.“We have embraced some of the international community’sapproach to continuing education by adding shorter learningopportunities/sessions. We have included a number of“mini-modules” where 6 presenters are given a 10-minutepresentation time to discuss their clinical approach ortechnique. We grouped these shorter presentationstogether, so attendees can learn different approachesto similar issues from a wide variety of experts. We alsocontacted our international members and encouragedthem to submit to present and opened opportunities forthem to moderate sessions at the conference if they didn’twant to present,” Erin Miller said.

The parallel conferences

Several mini conferences were run in parallel with the mainevent. The Academy Research Conference (ARC) on thefirst day looked at advances in amplification.Chaired by Todd Rickets, PhD, his committeepulled together an impressive line-up of globallyrenownedpresenters for the ARC includingFrank Lin, MD, PhD, Brent Edwards, PhDand Graham Naylor, PhD. Recent legislativedecisions regarding hearing instrumentdistribution and regulatory procedures willimpact the hearing health landscape over thecoming years. Presentations provided the latestadvances in the selection and fitting of hearingaids, as well as evidence-based research onbest practices and improvement in the qualityof life for people with hearing loss.

The third Global Conference on Central AuditoryProcessing Disorder on Saturday consideredthe ‘Synergies between Lab and Clinic’ andran in parallel with the Student Academy ofAudiology (SAA) one-day conference.

Read the whole article on Audio Infos United Kingdom #127; click on our library (free access).

Photos: AAA