Synopsis

The WHO’s World Hearing Day theme on 3^rd March 2021 is ‘Hearing care for all: screen, rehabilitate, communicate’. The Royal Children’s Hospital is home to the Victorian Infant Hearing Screening Program (VIHSP) that has been delivering world-class universal hearing screening to Victorian babies for over a decade. Beyond screening, the RCH Audiology Clinic provides diagnostic care, and the Caring for Hearing Impaired Children (CHIC) Clinic delivers a multidisciplinary medical service that intersects with external audiology and early intervention services for hearing-impaired children beyond the hospital. Both VIHSP and CHIC are integrated with a childhood hearing loss research program at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute to ensure evidence from research informs delivery of the best clinical care.

Speakers

Associate Professor Valerie Sung is a consultant paediatrician at The Royal Children’s Hospital, Team Leader and Senior Research Fellow at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, and Honorary Clinical Associate Professor of the Department of Paediatrics at the University of Melbourne. She is director of the Caring for Hearing Impaired Children Clinic and leads a research program on childhood hearing loss that has a unique health services framework encompassing population and clinical cohorts as well as intervention trials. The research program aims to identify early predictors of child outcomes to improve early prognostic counselling, establish evidence-based management through interventional trials, and ultimately discover ways to prevent or reduce hearing loss.

Dr Lilian Downie is a clinical geneticist and PhD candidate at the Melbourne Children’s Campus on the genetics of deafness and genomic newborn screening. She grew up in Tasmania and moved to Melbourne for medical school at Monash University. She graduated in 2009 with honours and undertook paediatric training at the Royal Children’s Hospital.

Ms Emma Webb is an audiologist and PhD candidate at the Melbourne Children’s Campus. Her PhD aims to understand and establish ways to facilitate early detection of congenital cytomegalovirus (CMV), the leading infectious cause of congenital hearing loss in infants and children.