Bec Bennett S2E2.mp4

I do some guest lecturing at some of the universities here in Australia.

And I talk about the social and emotional wellbeing research and these sorts of things.

And the students doing their audiology masters are always so diligent and they absorb everything, all the information like a sponge and they love these sorts of topics.

And at the end of the sort of few sessions that I do, I sort of flip it back on them and I sort of say, okay, how much do you think you've learned? How much are you changing your practice? How much do you love this topic? And everyone's all very eager and enthusiastic.

And then I say, okay, now I want you to think back to the last time you were at a family gathering and you're grandmother or grandfather or great uncle or maybe mother or father or someone older was at the family gathering who perhaps has hearing difficulties did you notice that they were enthusiastically engaged at the start of the evening and towards the end of the evening were they likely tired and less engaged and sitting at the end of the table with no one talking to

them

And then you see all these students start to sink and some of them get emotional and start crying and they say, oh my gosh, that's exactly right.

And they're so focused on providing this help and support in the clinic that they sometimes then forget to also take that home and treat their own grandparents or parents with that kind of support.

And so we talk about, okay, what can we do differently? We'll turn the music down or take grandma into a separate part of the house to have a conversation and rally all the grandkids or all the cousins and tell everyone, okay, this is what we need to do.

We each have to make sure we take turns to chat with grandma so that she's not lost in the sea of a hundred voices and all these sorts of things.

And so there are lots of things we can do to support, but we need to make sure that as clinicians, we're not just leaving it in the clinic, but we're actually taking those skill sets into every aspect of our life and teaching everyone around us.

Yeah.

And I think that's a really, really pertinent take home message, I think.

Um, I guess the, the point that I'd love our listeners to really understand, and I think it's difficult if you aren't the person with a hearing problem is, is we often think of hearing loss as volume, you know, that, um, you know, uh, you might think of uncle John, you know, but uncle John, he, he can, he knows before the dog knows when someone's driving up the driveway, for example, um, you know, and he, he just doesn't listen, you know, he switches off or something, but It's actually, it's more than volume.

So like in that case, it might be he can hear some tones better than other sounds, but he's just missing the punchline.

If I go back to that again, where he can hear words, but maybe has to work really hard to figure out which word he's heard better.

So, yeah, and I guess for us all to be really cognizant that it's not volume and these are people talking to people and we don't want anybody to disappear from their own life, right? So, yes, that's how we can sort of think about that.

Okay.

Can I just

add an analogy to that? So I like to think about when describing how hearing loss is experienced by individuals, I like to imagine a keyboard.

So if you imagine a piano or a keyboard, and if someone's playing a song and all the notes in the keyboard work perfectly well, then you can hear the song, you can enjoy the song, and you can recognize the song.

But you can also recognize all the notes in the song.

It's easy to listen to the song.

But when someone has hearing loss, it's like some of those notes are dampened or turned down, or some of those notes might even be missing.

So now if someone plays a very simple song, you can probably still concentrate and work out what it is, even if a couple of the keys are missing.