Hearing care for elders: a personal reflection on participatory action learning with primary care providers

This report is a reflective critical narrative of the authors' experience with an interdisciplinary collaboration of primary care providers (PCPs) and hearing health care providers (HHCPs) that followed the principles of participatory action research/learning. The goal for this report is to describe the 1st author's observed barriers to PCPs' willingness to learn about hearing health care and the subsequent facilitators to learning.

A team of PCPs and HHCPs created the "Communication: Hearing Loss in Elders" educational module. The module included (a) prereading developed from a combination of literature reviews and contextual factors and (b) a case study.

The authors present the list of topics included in the module, and they reflect on why and how these topics were deemed important by the team. In particular, 2 topics were identified for motivating PCPs' behavior regarding hearing health care: (a) the overlap in symptoms and possible causation among depression, dementia, and hearing loss and (b) how hearing can affect efficiency of care regarding other health issues.

This personal reflective narrative gives the authors' opinions about what can make for a successful collaboration and presents some hypotheses regarding information that may motivate behavior change with regard to hearing care.