Quality Standard for Rehabilitation of Young Deaf Children Receiving Cochlear Implants.

Background and objectives: More and more children with severe-to-profound hearing loss are receiving cochlear implants (CIs) at an early age to improve their hearing and listening abilities, speech recognition, speech intelligibility, and other aspects of spoken language development. Despite this, the rehabilitation outcomes can be very heterogeneous in this population, not only because of issues related to surgery and fitting or the specific characteristics of the child with his/her additional disabilities but also because of huge differences in the quality of the support and rehabilitation offered by the therapist and the family. These quality standards for the rehabilitation of young deaf children receiving CIs are developed within the European KA202 Erasmus+ project "VOICE"-vocational education and training for speech and language therapists and parents for the rehabilitation of children with CIs, Ref. No.: 2020-1-RO01-KA202-080059. Material and methods: To develop these quality standards, we used the input from the face-to-face interviews of 11 local rehabilitation experts in CIs from the four partner countries of the project and the outcomes of the bibliographic analysis of 848 publications retrieved from six databases: Pub Med, Psych Info, CINAHL, Scopus, Eric, and Cochrane. Based on all this information, we created a first set of 32 quality standards over four domains: general, fitting, rehabilitation, and for professionals. Further on, the Delphi method was used by 18 international rehabilitation experts to discuss and agree on these standards. Results: The results from the literature analysis and the interviews show us that more than 90% of the consulted international experts agreed on 29 quality standards. They focus on different aspects of rehabilitation: the multidisciplinary team, their expertise and knowledge, important rehabilitation topics to focus on, and programming issues related to rehabilitation. Conclusions: These quality standards aim to optimize the activity of speech rehabilitation specialists so that they reach the optimal level of expertise. Also presented is the necessary equipment for the IC team to carry out the rehabilitation sessions in good conditions. This set of quality standards can be useful to ensure the appropriate postoperative care of these children. As a result, the rehabilitation process will be more relaxed, and therapists will have the opportunity to focus more on the specific needs of each child, with the provision of quality services, which will result in better results. This theme is particularly complex and dependent on multifactorial aspects of medicine, education, speech therapy, social work, and psychology that are very intricate and interdependent.

Do we react differently toward bionic devices vs. cochlear implants and wheelchairs? Possible links with personality traits.

The present study explored the attitudes toward individuals with bionic eyes and limbs, cochlear implants, and people with disabilities that imply using a wheelchair. Our sample consisted of 474 Romanian adults aged 18-61 (M = 27.56, SD = 11.80). Participants were randomly divided into five groups. They all filled scales related to personality characteristics, i.e., agreeableness, neuroticism, openness to experience, comprehension/intellectual efficiency, and previous contact with disability. Then, each group was presented with a vignette describing a character (wheelchair/bionic eye/bionic leg/cochlear implant/control group). Finally, they answered questions about their emotions, cognitions, and behaviors related to that context. Overall, our results suggested that higher agreeability, extraversion, openness to experience, intellectual complexity, and lower neuroticism were generally associated with more positive attitudes toward disability. When examining the differences in participants' emotions, cognitions, and behaviors depending on the target's characteristics, our results generally suggested that the most negative reactions were toward the character with a bionic eye. We discuss these findings considering their importance for shaping positive attitudes related to disability, especially related to the future technological advances in bionic devices.