 Ten years ago children with a profound hearing impairment, like Christa Dracopoulos, would have attended a special school and relied on sign language.
This week, however, the five-year-old from Sydney's south will be joining a mainstream school and speaking just as well as the other children. Her mother, Tricia, said her daughter, who speaks Greek and English, was talking just as well as the average five-year-old. ''From the moment we found out that she was hearing-impaired, our aim was to get help for her to go to a mainstream school,'' Mrs Dracopoulos said. ''Christa is extremely excited and looking forward to it. Most people can't tell she is hearing-impaired.'' A new study, the first of its kind, from the Shepherd Centre in Sydney has found that since the State Government introduced screening of newborns in late 2002, early intervention has helped children reach the same level of communication and language skills as those without hearing problems. Aleisha Davis, acting director of clinical programs at the Shepherd Centre, said this was partly a result of early diagnosis through the newborn screening program and improvements in the development of hearing aids and cochlear implants. ''It is directly related to early intervention and the auditory-verbal therapy we use. It is about teaching the children how to listen and speak so they can sound like normal hearing children,'' she said. A study of 41 children graduating from the Shepherd Centre found most had language and vocabulary skills within the normal range of children of a similar age - a result unheard of 10 years ago. ''About 84 per cent of the general population is in the normal range and we are finding from our results that 79 per cent of children achieve normal vocabulary scores and 71 per cent have achieved normal language scores,'' Ms Davis said. ''The average age of children with hearing problems joining the Shepherd Centre program is now eight weeks, whereas a decade ago the average age was over two years.'' Ms Davis said that fitting children early with the latest hearing devices allowed them to participate in auditory-verbal therapy from a very early age. ''Early diagnosis, early fitting and early intervention are the keys to success,'' she said. (by smh.com.au)
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