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10/25/2016  |   8:40 AM - 9:45 AM   |  BGPOP Building 402/403/404

Universal Newborn Hearing Screening in the Philippines: A Continuing Journey

In a lower-middle-income country like the Philippines, Universal Newborn Hearing Screening was mandated with Republic Act 9709. Evidence-based research regarding the prevalence of hearing loss among newborns and high-risk children, and the impact on speech and language development of early detection and intervention, formed the basis for a position paper crafted by the Philippine Society of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery in 2007. The paper resulted in legislation two years later and the programme development led by the Department of Health and its technical arm the Newborn Hearing Screening Reference Centre. This presentation describes the results of such landmark researches that paved the way to developing this programme. Included is how the newborn hearing registry card was formulated and tested along with preferred reporting modalities. The registry card was formulated using a pilot programme implementation in accredited newborn hearing screening centers to serve as basis for the first phase of national implementation of Universal Newborn Hearing Screening in 2016. The initial results from the national registry database are presented along with coverage by the Philippine Health Insurance Corporation and other demographics. Issues regarding programme challenges are discussed along with the researches done towards developing a community based newborn hearing programme that can be used in areas where infrastructure for Newborn Hearing Screening remains inadequate. One challenge is the roaming screener and the voice test administration by community health workers. Also presented are the ongoing studies in using IT and M-health to enhance the delivery of Newborn Hearing Screening services vis-a-vis the initial efforts to apply tele-audiology protocols for Newborn Hearing Screening and beyond the hearing screening per se. There are indeed formidable challenges in carrying out a Universal Newborn Hearing Screening programme in an archipelagic country such as the Philippines, but innovative and practical approaches to hurdle these challenges have made the work in this field exciting and gratifying.

• Be informed about the development of universal newborn hearing screening in the Philippins
• Learn about the initial results from the newborn hearing screening database registry
• Learn about ongoing researches on the use of IT and M-health for newborn hearing screening

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Charlotte Chiong (POC,Primary Presenter,Author), President, Philippine Society of Otolaryngology -Head and Neck Surgery, charlotte_chiong@yahoo.com;
Since 1999 the author started studies on newborn hearing screening (NHS) and published the results of several studies on NHS which formed the basis for the legislation of UNHS in the Philippines in 2009 as RA 9709. In 2013 she obtained a doctorate degree from Radboud University Nijmegen with her dissertation on