Coalition for Global Hearing Health Hearing Care Pathways Working Group: Guidelines for Clinical Guidance for Readiness and Development of Evidence-Based Early Hearing Detection and Intervention Programs.
Christine Yoshinaga-Itano, Gwen Carr, Adrian Davis, Teresa Y C Ching, King Chung, Jackie Clark, Samantha Harkus, Meei-Ling Kuan, Suneela Garg, Sheila Andreoli Balen, Shannon O'Leary
PMID 38783422WHAT IT FOUND
This guideline provides a roadmap for building early hearing detection programs in low-resource settings.
It lists steps for screening, diagnosis, and family support but reports no patient outcomes or clinical trial results to guide individual treatment decisions.
What this paper is
This is a practice guideline and readiness checklist for developing early hearing detection and intervention programs in low- and middle-income countries. It outlines recommended steps, benchmarks, and resource levels for program implementation but reports no patient outcomes, trials, or clinical results. There are no findings here to change direct patient care on Monday.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the recommended timelines (such as diagnosis by 3 months) as evidence that meeting these deadlines improves individual patient outcomes. These are programmatic goals for service development, not clinically tested interventions with proven efficacy data.