Hearing Health Care: perception of the users of a public service

Evaluate hearing health service under the users' perspective according to the aspects: access, care, communication, and professional competence, and its correlation with clinical, sociodemographic and assistance characteristics.

This is an observational analytic cross-sectional study with a probability sample stratified by gender and age. The Hearing Health Care Assessment questionnaire and the Brazilian Economic Classification Criterion questionnaire were used. In total, 214 users were interviewed, which were assisted from May 2009 to May 2013.

It was observed that most of the evaluated users are female, elderly, literate, presenting moderate degree of hearing impairment, who had access to transportation out-of-pocket, was submitted to ENT evaluation for diagnosis and sought the service to purchase a hearing aid, besides belonging to class C. Regarding user satisfaction, most were satisfied with access, hearing evaluation, personalized service, benefit for the family, communication and information, and professional competence. In the analysis of correlation between the scores, it was found that when users are satisfied with access, as well as with communication and information, the total score increases with moderate correlation coefficient.

The users showed greater satisfaction with the professional competence domain and lower satisfaction with the benefit for the family. In addition, assessment proved that access and communication are considered important quality indicators for the hearing health service according to users.