New Brunswick HEARS: outcomes of a community-delivered hearing intervention adapted for older adults in Atlantic Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To assess acceptability and benefit of a community-based hearing intervention delivered at no cost to lower-income older adults with untreated hearing loss in New Brunswick, Canada. DESIGN: Mixed method pre-post intervention study investigating aspects of communication function and social support at baseline and three months post-intervention. STUDY SAMPLE: 124 of 175 independent-living older adults screened at the study site and in local community centres in low-income neighbourhoods were recruited into the study. RESULTS: In 70 (56.5%) participants self-identified as female and 54 (43.5%) as male, with mean age of 74.5 years, mean effect sizes measured from baseline to 3-months post-intervention were 0.99 (large) for HHIE-S, 0.58 (medium) for DSSI, and 1.02 (large) for LSEQ indicating significant improvement in self-perceived communication function, social support and listening self-efficacy, respectively. CONCLUSION: The HEARS program is feasible to implement, despite Covid-19 pandemic related challenges, highly acceptable to participants, and associated with a range of benefits that include improved communication function, self-efficacy and social support. The success of HEARS in a new population in a second Canadian province indicates its adaptability and suitability for scaling to extend the reach of hearing services for older adults who may not otherwise access care.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".