Status of Women committee  We can provide you with materials, even if we have to write them tomorrow. We all know what needs to be understood. For health care providers, the mix of understanding of the impact of hearing loss and what it looks like to have somebody sitting in front of you who doesn't under

Status of Women committee  As for batteries—and I know they can cost a huge amount each month—the manufacturers are making rechargeable hearing aids, which is great. As for support funding, it is so inappropriately done across the country. Some areas are more funded than others. In Ontario, the assisted

Status of Women committee  We need to mount some very strong public awareness campaigns. Get it out there everywhere, so that families who support seniors and the seniors themselves understand that hearing loss is a major issue and it should not be considered a terrible thing as you age. There is a stigm

Status of Women committee  We have some studies going on. There is the “Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging”. I'm sure you know about this study. We were fortunate enough to encourage them to include not only survey analysis but audiometric testing. We've had one paper published, and we are on the cusp

Status of Women committee  We're all struggling. Australia pays for every single service and device for seniors in their country. In the U.K., they do that also. The U.K.—to discuss a common issue here—has appointed a minister for loneliness, because it's a huge issue. Hearing loss leads to that, as does

Status of Women committee  Absolutely. Quite a lot of research is going on with trying to understand the relationship between hearing loss and dementia. We know that there are some published, peer-reviewed, well-designed studies that have linked cognitive decline to dementia, but there's much more work tha

Status of Women committee  A very quick answer is that yes, it creates a great deal of stress with extended family, communities and caregivers, and you can imagine that leads to depression and other challenges as well.

Status of Women committee  If you take a broader perspective and consider the value in return of preventing depression, isolation, loneliness, the kinds of challenges that we see with falls and early cognitive decline—if you take that into perspective—the investment in hearing health with hearing devices a

Status of Women committee  The best solution is to discuss this with your physician, and/or go directly to an audiologist physician who would refer to a hearing instrument practitioner. These professionals are trained in helping individuals to understand their own situation and how it impacts their lives,

Status of Women committee  Absolutely, 100%, it has. It's not just when you're in your middle years and as a teenager now with the MP3 devices and so on. As you age, if you have that noise-induced hearing loss, it exacerbates normal aging-related hearing loss. That's a huge challenge. Again, we need publi

Status of Women committee  We all listened to it.

Status of Women committee  Thank you very much, Pam. My name is Jean Holden, and my colleague here is Valerie Spino. We represent the Hearing Health Alliance of Canada. We are representing a number of groups. We are representing consumers, hearing health care professionals, the hearing industry and founda