KNOW HOW | It Takes a Village: Lessons in Group Aural Rehabilitation Therapy

By Aaron M. Roman

This article is a part of the March/April 2018, Volume 30, Number 2, Audiology Today issue.

Every Tuesday around 2:15 pm, a clamor of voices can be heard outside of my office.

These are not the voices of students, excited to end their school day, nor are they the voices of my faculty co-workers, filling their coffee mugs. Instead, these voices come from the six individuals that consist of the weekly group aural rehabilitation session. These six individuals come from a variety of backgrounds, with a diverse arrangement of hearing impairments, but all share one common goal—to improve their hearing beyond what their current situation provides.

As anyone who has worked with the hearing-impaired population is aware, there is no magical switch when it comes to hearing loss. Activating a cochlear implant after years of long-term hearing loss does not restore hearing to normal levels, nor does simply wearing a well-programmed pair of hearing aids. Instead, listening improvement occurs with time, acclimation, patience, and, most importantly, persistence. In this article, I will outline the most important takeaways that I have learned through administering weekly group therapy. It is my hope that you may learn from where I stumbled.

Lesson #1: Developing (Measurable) Goals Is Hard

One of the most important lessons that I learned as a relatively recent graduate from my doctorate program is that the best way to ensure success is to develop realistic, measurable goals. As audiologists, we have a continually growing number of subjective questionnaires at our disposal, which can successfully assess individual performance. Using these questionnaires with a setting of six patients, however, has repeatedly proven a difficult task.

Having no access to the one, perfect questionnaire, my team begins group therapy by administering the Patient Expectation Worksheet (PEW) to each individual at the very beginning of the therapy semester (group therapy is provided each semester), to assess the range of expectations within the group. Developing realistic expectations for therapy outcomes is essential for any intervention protocol, and helps create a strong initial dialogue with the patients involved (Palmer and Mormer, 1999).