Six months and Around 2000 Patients Since Opening
The Health and Wellness Center
Audio logy
Department
The Health and Wellness Center opened its Audiology Department in May 2003, four months before the official opening of the Center. Since opening six months ago, the Audiology clinic has been providing a much needed quality clinical services to individuals with communication disorders. As such, the number of people that our audiologist sees is on the increase each day. A full range of audiological evaluations is available at the Audiology Department for both children and adults. The primary goal of the evaluation is to determine the patient's hearing status. If a hearing loss exists, results of the evaluation indicate the nature, extent, and pattern of the loss. The audiologist then consults with the patient to establish a treatment plan unique to the patient's needs.
So far, over 1612 patients have visited our premises for a hearing or dizziness checkup. The people seeking our services, both young and old, came from near and far. They came form different parts of the West Bank, from the north, center, and the south as well as the Jordan Valley. Some patients, especially those coming form the northern districts, the majority of whom are children under the age of 3, had to cross over 8 military checkpoints and had to begin their journey the day before to make sure that they are in Bethlehem on the day of their appointment. From Hebron, the southern most district in the West Bank, 294 patients, or 18% of the total, came, while fifty-six people came from East Jerusalem itself and three others came from the Jericho district in the Jordan Valley. As for the Ramallah district, at the center of the West Bank, nine individuals, or 0.04% of the total, came, where another nine came all the way from the northern districts, seven from Nablus and two from Tulkarem. Still, the overriding majority of patients came from the Bethlehem district. Hence, we have received at the Health and Wellness Center around 1241 patients (76%) from Bethlehem and its surrounding Refugee Camps and villages.
To
spread the notion of wellness to as many Palestinian localities as possible and
to provide our needed audiology services, the Audiology Department has been
conducting outreach programs in the surrounding villages and refugee camps as
well as to East Jerusalem. Two programs were carried out in July in the Deheisha
Refugee Camp in Bethlehem and the village of Batir, which is one of the
Bethlehem district villages. On the two visits, 97 people, both young and old,
were screened for hearing problems. The outreach program in East Jerusalem,
which was started in August, is an ongoing weekly program, where our Audiologist
goes to the Augusta Victoria Hospital in Jerusalem for a day-clinic every
Tuesday. Our next step is to set up a bi-weekly outreach program in Ramallah
within the next few weeks to better serve the northern districts of the West
Bank.
Last, but not least, the Audiology clinic at the Health and Wellness Center, through our audiologist, provides valuable consulting services once a week to the school of the hearing impaired in Bethlehem. Around 100 children enrolled in the school have regular checkups and adjustments to their hearing aids through our Center. We hope to extend these services to other schools and institutions in the West Bank that deal with children with hearing problems.