World Wide Hearing Foundation

Background

Founded in 2011, the World Wide Hearing Foundation develops innovative means of providing high quality, affordable hearing care to children and youth in underserved communities. By using mobile technologies, training local personnel, and building “last-mile” distribution networks, WWH significantly reduces the cost of providing hearing care. Its interventions are designed to ensure long-term follow-up services in order to connect people to their world through better hearing and thus enable greater social inclusion, as well as access to education and employment.

Full Description

A grant from the Foundation will help the World Wide Hearing Foundation (WWH) to train 24 local public health workers in Nunavut to identify ear and hearing problems, such as infections, punctured ear drums, and obstructions. They will then return to their communities, to perform screenings and to train other health-care workers to identify hearing problems. Additionally, the diagnoses done by these local healthcare workers will be linked to a database that will allow WWH to establish detailed prevalence rates in this region for the first time. This data will then be made available to researchers, governments, and NGOs with the goal of improving healthcare in Nunavut.

http://www.wwhearing.org/