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DOI: 10.1055/s-0043-1769622
The Need for a Global Hearing Care Framework
Hearing healthcare is undergoing dramatic transformation. Teleaudiology is providing a new way in which clinicians can provide hearing services, hearables and other technologies are offering alternatives to hearing aids for hearing help, and over-the-counter hearing aid regulation has allowed consumer stores and online retail to sell hearing aids directly to the person with hearing difficulty. These changes and others are opportunities for improving and expanding hearing healthcare to more people in new ways, but with all of this change comes confusion.
Common questions that arise are whether teleaudiology will make audiologists obsolete, whether hearables will replace hearing aids, whether retail distribution of hearing aids will replace clinical care. There is a need for a method to describe the changes that are happening that answers these questions, and give clarity to how the different aspects of hearing healthcare relate to each other. Such a method will also provide a way to easily compare different approaches to hearing healthcare, with the traditional approach to fitting a hearing aid by an audiologist in a clinic being just one of many approaches now available to meet the needs of those with hearing difficulty.
Publication History
Article published online:
12 June 2023
© 2023. The Author(s). This is an open access article published by Thieme under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonDerivative-NonCommercial License, permitting copying and reproduction so long as the original work is given appropriate credit. Contents may not be used for commercial purposes, or adapted, remixed, transformed or built upon. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)
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