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Audiology and Balance Clinic
The Audiology and
Balance Clinic, the first program at the Dar al-Kalima Health and
Wellness Center, started its operation on May 15th of 2003.
The help of the Wheat Ridge Ministries, through a generous donation
from the Mill Neck Foundation, made this project feasible. Equipped
with the state of art equipment, the Audiology clinic provides
assessment and rehabilitation of the hard of hearing of all age
groups, but with a special emphasis on children. The ultimate goal of
the program is to conduct a national survey of the hearing problems
among our Palestinian children to help parents and educationalists
avoid the educational problems that may occur.
The Audiology clinic
provides the first of its kind dizziness testing, using VIDEO-NY-STAG-MOGRAPHY,
which helps medical doctors give a more accurate diagnosis to the
patients as to the cause of the dizziness.
Area of Referrals
The goal of the
Audiology Clinic is to serve the hearing impaired in all of Palestine.
However, due to the current political unrest and closures that are
imposed on Palestinian cities, few patients reach our clinic from the
northern part of the country. The statistics of the clinic showed that
the majority of referrals come from the greater Bethlehem area. Hebron
area comes in second with of clinic referrals. A relatively small
percentage of patients come from the midlands and the northern part of
the country. In order that our services become accessible to the
aforementioned areas, an outreach program for Audiology was
established in 2003 with the Augusta Victoria hospital, providing
services for East Jerusalem and its surrounding areas. In addition,
our future ambition is to run a similar program on a monthly basis in
the city of Ramallah.
The Audiology and
Balance Program’s Activities
The Audiology and
Balance Program’s goal is to detect the hearing-impaired children at
an early stage so that they can acquire their language at an early age
and to live side by side among their normal hearing peers. In this
direction, the Audiology clinic conducts free screening hearing
program every few months at locations away from the clinic. |
