Covid-19 has necessitated that many patient pathways to be reconfigured due to social distancing as well as personal protective considerations for patients and staff. In this seminar we will consider the patient experience, the public health implications of Covid-19 for hearing healthcare professionals, surgery and anaesthesia risks, and organisational changes needed within a service to facilitate recovery of clinical activity.

Watch the presentations from this webinar here.

Chair: Gerard O’Donoghue (Nottingham)

Presenters: Katherine Bouton (US), Frank Lin (US), Bruce Gantz (US), Thomas Roland (US), Douglas Hartley (UK), Thomas Lenarz (DE), Robert Briggs (AU)

The need to maintain social distancing during the pandemic has required clinical services to restrict ‘face to face’ contact episodes and thus remote care may become a necessity. We begin with the patient experience and then draw on the field of remote hearing-aid fitting prior to considering clinical experience with cochlear implants. Could intraoperative cochlear neurophysiology inform this approach? We will then consider how the domain of artificial intelligence could be transformative in enabling the wider adoption of remote care.

Watch the presentations from this webinar here.

Chair: Helen Cullington (Southampton)

Presenters: Patrizia DiGiovanni (AU), DeWet Swanepoel (SA), Frederic Venail (FR), Stephen O’Leary (AU), Michelle Kraskin (US), Colleen Psarros (AU), R Ranjith (IN), Paul Govaerts (BE)

Outcomes from paediatric cochlear implantation depend on the quality of early intervention and habilitation services to minimise the deleterious effects of auditory deprivation. We plan to start the webinar with the account of a parent’s experience accessing hearing healthcare for their child during Covid-19 and will then examine how the pandemic disrupted hearing screening programmes and imposed delays to the referral pathways for early intervention. We will consider the barriers clinicians encountered and what strategies worked to recover services.

Watch the presentations from this webinar here.

Chair: Catherine McMahon (Sydney)

Presenters: Hannah Cooper (UK), Carolina Leal (UK), Christine Yoshinaga-Itano (US), Blake Papsin (CA), Kevin Franck (US), Lise Henderson (UK)