Abstract

PHANGUPHANGU, Mukovhe  and  ROSS, Andrew J.. Reliability of nurse-administered infant hearing screening using otoacoustic emissions. S. Afr. J. Commun. Disord. [online]. 2025, vol.72, n.1, pp.1-8. ISSN 2225-4765.  https://doi.org/10.4102/sajcd.v72i1.1092.

BACKGROUND: In South Africa (SA), congenital hearing loss (HL) is identified at around 30 months of age, which is later than local standards of identification by 6 weeks, mainly because of limited access to infant and newborn hearing screening (INHS). Thus, there is a critical need to explore other models of providing early detection such as nurse-administered INHS OBJECTIVES: This study aimed to determine the reliability of nurse-administered INHS METHOD: This was a repeated-measures study where 50 infants scheduled to receive their 6-week immunisation were independently screened by two nurses and an audiologist using distortion product otoacoustic emissions (DPOAE). Data were analysed using Cohen's kappa, using Stata v18 for Macintosh RESULTS: Thirteen (n = 13, 26%) infants failed DPOAE screening tests, of which four were male and nine (n = 9) were female. All participants who failed the screening were referred to the hospital for further evaluation and intervention as needed. Further analysis revealed an almost perfect agreement between audiologist- and nurse-administered screening (k = 0.81, p < 0.001 CONCLUSION: Findings from this study demonstrate that nurses can consistently screen and identify babies with congenital HL using DPOAE screening tests. Furthermore, these findings pave the way for incorporating nurse-administered DPOAE screening into immunisation programmes, with the potential to increase access to INHS and reduce the age of identification of congenital HL to acceptable standards. Large-scale research is recommended to explore the implementation of this nurse-administered INHS in other contexts CONTRIBUTION: This study contributes to the growing body of evidence on INHS in SA

Keywords : congenital hearing loss; Infant hearing screening; nurse-administered screening; reliability studies; otoacoustic emissions screening; rural setting.

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