Hospital care does not meet the communication needs of patients with hearing loss: A qualitative study of patient experiences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Good communication is essential for high quality healthcare. People with hearing loss face communication challenges during health encounters, which may compromise their experience with care and outcomes, especially in noisy or stressful acute care facilities. Tools and strategies to facilitate two-way communication with these patients and other members of their healthcare team may help address this gap. This study describes the communication-related experiences of patients with hearing loss in Alberta hospitals, which can help inform future strategies in this setting. METHODS: Drawing on qualitative description, we conducted focus groups and individual interviews with people with hearing loss who had a recent hospital experience in Alberta, Canada. Focus group and interview transcripts were abductively coded and analyzed, guided by established communication frameworks to explore experiences and opportunities for change. RESULTS: Fourteen people participated in 3 focus groups and 3 interviews. Overall, participants perceived hospitals as not meeting their communication needs. We identified 3 themes: 1) Hearing loss is an invisible disability; 2) Communication is a team effort; 3) Every patient has different needs in different situations. CONCLUSIONS: Patients with hearing loss experience communication gaps while in hospital, possibly related to the invisibility and stigma of hearing loss, the lack of awareness about how to identify and accommodate different communication needs, and systemic barriers. Strategies to identify patients' communication needs, train healthcare providers, and increase the uptake of communication tools may help improve communication in this population.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".