Survey of care pathway for auditory processing disorder

Abstract

In October 2003, the British Society of Audiology instigated the development of a Special Interest Group to study auditory processing disorder (APD) in the UK, and a steering committee was appointed. There is limited epidemiological information on APD, mainly because there is no general agreement on diagnostic markers. This is exacerbated by the potential overlap between the symptomatology of APD and other developmental conditions that impact on differential diagnosis. Children are referred for and receive clinical labels of APD but no clear evidence existed of service provision for those identified with APD in the UK. The APD Steering Committee aimed to check the Care Pathway for children currently identified with, or suspected of having, APD. A short questionnaire was developed which comprised 25 items. The questions addressed care pathway issues from screening and referral route, through diagnosis and management. The questionnaire was sent via email to practitioners in audiology (n = 407) and speech language therapy, SLT (n = 350) for whom an email address was available from datasets easily accessible to the steering committee. There was an overall response rate of 46% with only a minimal response from respondents who provide services only for adults. Hence this article reports on the survey outcomes for paediatric services only. Comparison with the number of paediatric hearing services trained by the Modernising Children's Hearing Aid Services (MCHAS) team and the identified geographical coverage over England, suggests these data can be generalized across England for audiology services but not for SLT. Only a small percentage of respondents provide a screen (9.6%) or diagnostic (11.1%) service for this condition. Over half the respondents report being at best ‘not well’ informed about APD. Perhaps the most interesting finding is that only a minimal number of respondents who offer to diagnose APD consider they are ‘very well informed’ about the condition. This raises a question on the confidence of diagnoses provided by such services.

• children
• listening problems
• developmental disorder

Notes

¹The leaflet is available free of charge for single copies or very small numbers from Deafness Research UK (previously known as Defeating Deafness) <http://www.deafnessresearch.org.uk> and can be purchased in larger quantities from the MRC Institute of Hearing Research <http://www.ihr.mrc.ac.uk > 

²The terms Audiology or Audiologist, unless otherwise stated, are used in this report to cover all professions which are specifically connected to audiology, e.g. clinicians, physicians, consultants, scientists, etc.