Identifying clients’ readiness for hearing rehabilitation within initial audiology appointments: a pilot intervention study

Abstract

Objective: The current study sought to explore audiologists’ use of the Ida Institute Motivation Tools to help them identify clients’ readiness for change within initial assessment appointments.

Design: The study involved a mixed methods intervention design. Data were collected pre- and post-training audiologists to use the Ida Motivation tools in their appointments. Appointments were video-recorded and analysed using conversation analysis. Clients and audiologists also completed questionnaires within each appointment to measure clients’ readiness-for-change.

Study sample: Participants included 5 audiologists and 22 adult clients from two Audiology clinics.

Results: Audiologists incorporated the Ida Motivation tools into the post-training appointments without a significant increase in appointment time. The Ida tools solicited responses from clients that displayed their ambivalence regarding hearing rehabilitation/aids within their talk. Post‐training, audiologists’ perceptions of clients’ stage of readiness were not significantly more likely to match clients’ self-reported stage on the URICA.

Conclusions: The Ida Motivation tools may be useful to solicit clients’ ambivalent feelings towards hearing rehabilitation/aids, however, it is important for audiologists to actively listen for ambivalence within clients’ interactional responses to the tools in order judge clients’ readiness.

Keywords:

• Audiology
• hearing rehabilitation
• client readiness
• transtheoretical model
• patient-centred care
• conversation analysis

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Samantha Tai and Simone Schuetz for their help with data collection/entry for this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded by an Ida Institute Research Grant.