Journal of emergency nursing : JEN : official publication of the Emergency Department Nurses Association
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Providing Hearing Assistance to Veterans in the Emergency Department: A Qualitative Study.
Effective communication is essential to good health care, and hearing loss disrupts patient-provider communication. For the more than 2 million veterans with severe hearing loss, communication is particularly challenging in noisy health care environments such as emergency departments. The purpose of this qualitative study was to describe patient and provider perspectives of feasibility and potential benefit of providing a hearing assistance device, a personal amplifier, during visits to an emergency department in an urban setting affiliated with the Department of Veterans Affairs. ⋯ Providing the personal amplifier improved the ED experience for veterans and offers a promising intervention that could improve health care quality and safety for ED patient populations.