A survey of the attitudes of practitioners toward teleaudiology

Abstract

Objective: To survey hearing healthcare practitioners’ (1) attitudes toward teleaudiology appointments, (2) willingness to conduct different clinical tasks via teleaudiology, and (3) willingness to conduct a teleaudiology appointment with different patient populations. Design: All participants were asked to complete the Attitudes toward Teleaudiology Scale for Practitioners (ATS-P), a 46-item online survey designed for this study. Study sample: The responses from 202 hearing healthcare practitioners working in Canada were collected. The sample consisted of 152 audiologists, 49 hearing instrument specialists, and one who did not specify a category. Results: The majority of respondents indicated that teleaudiology is likely to have a minimal effect on the quality of hearing healthcare in audiology and the quality of client-practitioner interactions, although many respondents indicated that teleaudiology would have a positive effect on accessibility to service. Nevertheless, a small minority of respondents indicated that teleaudiology would have a negative impact on quality of care in audiology. Conclusions: Willingness to use teleaudiology depended on a combination of the clinical tasks to be performed and the patient populations to be served. These findings can help guide the successful implementation of teleaudiology services.

Key Words::

• Attitudes
• teleaudiology
• telemedicine
• survey

Note

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express their gratitude to all of the participants who took part in this study. Funding for this research was provided in part by a MITACS Elevate Industrial Postdoctoral Fellowship awarded to the first author, and from Sonova Holding AG. Finally the authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of the following undergraduate students: Sheraz Cheema, Ysabel Domingo, Adam Erwood, Margaret Loong, Anouli Patel, and Arthiga Thayapararajah.

Declaration of interest: The authors declare that partial funding of the research and the post-doctoral fellowship of the first author were provided to the University of Toronto and the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute by Sonova Holding AG.

Notes

1. One of the items from the ATS-P was dropped and we have limited our presentation throughout the manuscript to 45 of the original 46 items that participants completed. The dropped item (‘In your opinion, how will the delivery of audiological services via information communication technologies affect the amount of time spent treating clients’) yielded clear responses; however, interpreting the responses as positive or negative depends on whether less/more time treating patients has positive or negative value. Because some people would view less time as positive and others would view less time as negative, we decided to drop this item from the present analyses.