A while ago Gerdie Kuik visited us. Our audiologist Guido Makker invited her to tell us something about hearing loss in children. He asked because he is traveling to Nepal in March to help many hearing-impaired children there.
Gerdie Kuik worked for many years at the Bertha Muller School in Utrecht. Here she did a lot of audiological care for hearing-impaired children.
Gerdie is now specialized in audiometry for children and knows better than anyone what impact it has to offer children hearing aids at an early stage of hearing loss. She tells more about it in this interview.
How important are hearing aids for children with hearing loss?
Gerdie explains that good hearing is crucial for children, not only so that they can hear better, but also for their development. "If a child cannot hear well, they start to miss things like different pitches or the sounds of words. As a result, the child does not pick up on certain things or picks them up incorrectly," says Gerdie. Children must therefore be able to hear well, but not everyone can afford an aid like a hearing aid. And many children never get the chance to have their hearing tested at all, which means that they often do not know whether they have hearing loss. Think of children in developing countries like Nepal, who often spend their entire childhood with poor hearing and suffer so much developmental delay that they still suffer from it later in life.
Our goal is to counter this by traveling to Nepal in March with two employees of OnlineHoortoestel.nl and an ENT specialist. Together with a few local activists, they will organize a hearing week there. During this hearing week, they will visit a different village in the province of Chitwan every day. The local population is called upon to report if they have hearing problems. Our audiologists will then conduct hearing tests, adjust hearing aids and donate hearing aids to the local population. All of this is made possible thanks to the customers of OnlineHoortoestel.nl. For every order, we donate to the Child Welfare Organization Nepal (CWON) foundation, which tries to improve life in the poorest areas of Nepal.