Hearing Care for Older Adults: Beyond the Audiology Clinic

The purpose of this article was to highlight the importance of hearing health care beyond the clinic for older people with impaired hearing.

To emphasize factors affecting the success of audiologic rehabilitation for older people and to describe practical clinical and community-based strategies to promote successful hearing health care.

Older people are not always aware of the extent of their hearing loss, they may not always expect to benefit from using a hearing aid, and they often have low self-efficacy for managing to learn to use hearing aids. Increased knowledge and support from other health professionals, family caregivers and significant others could optimize older peoples' participation in everyday activities.

Further work is needed to develop new interventions for older people with impaired hearing and to increase collaboration with general practitioners as well as other health-care professionals.