Province steps up funding for infant hearing program
Extra $3.2 million expected to provide better diagnostic tests, services
Thanks to Parker McKay’s hearing aids he is a toddler who is simply choosing not to listen.
“Fast and furious is how Parker was born,” said Renée LaCompte, the three-year-old’s mother. “Anyone who knows Parker knows he’s only ever had that one speed.”
LaCompte was speaking at a Tuesday news conference at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario where Michael Coteau, Ontario’s children and youth services minister, announced $3.2 million in funding for the province’s infant hearing program.
CHEO will receive a portion of the investment, though a specific amount has yet to be determined.
Parker was born with what turned out to be genetic hearing loss. His parents have no family history of hearing loss, so the diagnosis was a shock to LaCompte and Ryan McKay, Parker’s father. Their eldest son Jackson, 5, does not have hearing loss.
McKay entered the infant hearing program at CHEO as a baby, and without the help of the hearing aids he wears today, his speech and language development may have been stunted.
The hearing program enables babies as young as a day old to be screened to determine potential hearing loss.
The funding “is great news for us,” said Marie Pigeon, senior audiologist at CHEO.
With the infusion of cash, the IHP plans to expand to provide patients with better access to diagnostic tests that follow initial screenings, along with better access to intervention services once the hearing loss is identified.
This will give “kids better access to having better and faster hearing screenings done,” Pigeon said.
The IHP has been in place since 2001 and screens 93 to 96 per cent of newborn babies in Ontario.
In the past 10 years, with the help of the IHP, the average age at which children have been identified with permanent hearing loss has gone from about two-and-a-half years to less than four months, Coteau said.
“With our government’s expansion of the Infant Hearing Program, along with the dedication and commitment of community partners, agencies and staff, babies who have permanent hearing loss will have access to supports and services that help them to reach their full potential,” Coteau said.
Parker was given his hearing aids as a baby and LaCompte and her husband said they struggled long and hard to keep him from pulling them out of his ears.
“Now he asks for them,” LaCompte said.
Which is a good thing, because they’ve helped him better live with his impairment.
“Parker at age three is advanced in his speech and language despite having moderately severe hearing loss,” Pigeon said.
So advanced, in fact, that McKay surprised his father after the news conference when he started singing the French nursery song Frère Jacques.
“I didn’t know he knew the second verse,” his father said.
… Babies who have permanent hearing loss will have access to supports and services … reach their full potential.