Departments
Features
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: Recognizing Privilege
A few years ago, I had a set of in-ear headphones that I used to listen to music, and, as an audiologist, I made a pair of custom molds. Because the eartips frequently slipped out of the silicon molds, I used a short length of #13 hearing aid tubing to secure them, but over time...
More Than Inclusive: Building Affirming Care for 2SLGBTQ+ Communities
Editor’s Note: While Canada can sometimes pat itself on the back for its legal protections and the presence of advocacy organizations for 2SLGBTQ+ people, access to competent, quality healthcare is not always guaranteed. 2SLGBTQ+ adults report anxiety, frustration, and isolation when seeking medical care as well as instances of their identity being ignored, misunderstood, or...
Access Points: The Missing 27% at Your Front Desk–Why Audiologists Must Lead Canada’s Accessibility Fight
Editor’s Note: I would like to introduce a new regular feature-Access Points. This is written by Lorin MacDonald, CM, OOnt, LSM, JD. Lorin is a hard-of-hearing disability rights lawyer with over 30 years of experience in accessibility law and advocacy. She is a Member of the Order of Canada, the Order of Ontario, and the...
Universal Design for Hearing: Advancing Accessibility Across Canada
Introduction Hearing loss is one of the most prevalent chronic conditions in Canada and globally, yet hearing accessibility remains inconsistently addressed across workplaces, educational settings, and community environments. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that over 1.5 billion people worldwide live with some degree of hearing loss, with nearly 430 million requiring rehabilitation services (WHO,...
CASLPO 2024–2025 DEI Report Released
Editor’s Note: “Continuing the Momentum” is a report from the College of Audiologists and Speech-Language Pathologists of Ontario (CASLPO) that highlights their efforts to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion in the services offered by audiologists and speech-language pathologists in Ontario. This report is shared for information only, with permission from CASLPO. For any questions or...
Indigenous Peoples Guide to Terminology, Usage Tips & Definitions
Editor’s Note: Audiologists and other hearing health care professionals in Canada frequently work with Indigenous Peoples who have hearing loss. Hearing loss from untreated middle ear disorders (and undiagnosed sensori-neural hearing loss) is quite common across the Inuit, Metis, and Innu populations. Hearing loss is frequently referred to as the Invisible Handicap; its onset can...
Patient-Provider Healthcare Communication in the Hospital Setting
Abstract Effective communication in hospital settings remains challenging for patients with hearing loss and contributes to hearing impairment’s adverse effects on health and related health outcomes. The purpose of this quality improvement study was to proactively address communication barriers imposed by hearing loss in a hospital setting using Wi-Fi-based wireless smartphone technology during patient-provider face-to-face encounters. Over ten weeks, smartphones were...
Spoken language vs Sign Language: Are We Stuck In This Binary?
It is generally agreed upon in the literature that when children who are deaf or hard of hearing (with no additional “disabilities”) receive high quality language access early, preferably by six months of age, they can achieve language outcomes commensurate with their typically hearing peers before five years of age. This large body of work...
An Innovative Clinical Placement in a First Nations Community
Hearing is critical to the development of spoken language and education. Access to hearing services is however not universal, especially in remote areas. Many First Nations communities are located in rural remote regions in Northern Ontario,1 and have limited access to hearing care compared to non-Indigenous Canadians. Rurality and remoteness are correlated with poorer health outcomes.2...
Columns
What’s New About Getting Older?
Hearing Accessibility to Optimize Person-Environment Fit for Older Adults: Social Environments and Inclusion Matter “My voice is loud so I don’t need to use the microphone.”“People can hear so let’s not bother with the captions for this meeting.”“It wasn’t important, so never mind.” HEARING ACCESSIBILITY: FROM CLINIC TO SOCIETY Defining Hearing Accessibility: The term ‘hearing...
Audiology in the Classrooms
Introducing Canadian Educational Audiologists: A professional network and learning community For long term readers of Canadian Audiologist, you may recall that the column “Audiology in the Classrooms was first published in 2018”. There were several goals for including this content as a regular feature in the journal. These included, first and most importantly, providing a...
Sound Business Sense
Strategic Business Planning Part II Part I of Strategic Business Planning focused on the initial steps to take when embarking on a venture to develop a new business. The next step is to solidify the process: The Formal Business Plan. Berry (2023) asserts that a formal business plan is a strategy designed to help...
From the Labs to the Clinics
Science is Better with Sex and Gender Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) have long been important considerations in scientific and medical research. Since 2021, our major research funding agency, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) has mandated the integration of sex and gender considerations into health-related research [1]. Indeed, CIHR has been a world...
The Way I Hear It
You Can Hear That – Seriously!? As a hearing care professional, your shared listening time with your clients is usually limited to clinic appointments. You have a good idea of what they can hear, or should be able to hear, and you’ve seen their reaction to new levels of sound through hearing aids and cochlear...
Volunteer Subjects Wanted for Online Research
https://alumni.mcmaster.ca/controls/email_marketing/view_in_browser.aspx?sid=1439&gid=1&sendId=363393&ecatid=20&puid=c00d7fea-a570-4534-adb5-f5a178bb59d5 Call for Singers Join an Innovative Choir Research Project at McMaster’s LIVELab Have you ever wondered how the acoustics of a room – or the gestures of a conductor – shape the way we sing? We are looking for choral singers (SATB) to take part in a unique music-science project at McMaster University’s LIVELab...