KOCHI: Child Care Centre will distribute free hearing aids to 50 children aged between six months and 15 years on Saturday in connection with the World Disability Day observance.
District Collector K. Mohammed Y. Safirulla will distribute aids at a programme to be held at Child Care Centre on Saturday at 9 a.m. The event is being organised as part of the ‘Swaram’ project of the ‘Hearing Friendly Ernakulam District’ programme. Besides an exhibition on learning disability, a booklet and CD on learning disabilities will be released on the occasion.
Child Care Centre is a joint initiative of the Indian Academy of Paediatrics, Kochi Branch, and the Ernakulam District Council for Child Welfare with the District Collector as Chairman.
Two-hundred out of the 1,40,000 newborns screened in Ernakulam since 2003 under the Centralised Newborn Hearing Screening Programme of Child care Centre were found to have deafness at birth.
The programme was expanded across the district in 2013, thus making screening of all newborns in as many as 78 hospitals possible.
“This centralised model, with no investment by participating hospitals and minimum number of machines, was appreciated by the World Health Organisation, which is planning to replicate the model in South East Asia. The model is also being replicated in other cities in the country,” Child Care Centre executive director Abraham K. Paul said.
Early identification at birth and remediation before the child attains six months of age will obviate the need for expensive cochlear implant surgery in majority of cases. Ernakulam is the first district in India to implement a centralised newborn hearing screening programme.
