Person-Centered Care: Not Just Icing on the Cake

January 2019

Lise Lotte Bundesen

The Ida Institute has been a pioneer in advocating for—and facilitating—person-centered care (PCC) in hearing health care since its foundation in 2007.

At the time, the concept of person-centered care was still relatively new in audiology. Together with a burgeoning community of hearing care professionals, academics, and other experts, we were instrumental in forging some of the key concepts in person-centered thinking and in developing some of the first tools for applying person-centered care in practice. Today, the Ida Institute is known globally as an authority on person-centered care and has a community of more than 16,000 hearing care professionals around the world. The Ida Institute has established partnerships with renowned universities as well as leading patient and professional organizations—including ASHA—with whom they work to promote a person-centered approach to hearing care.

Tools to Help Deliver Person-Centered Care

Our philosophy is that person-centered care shouldn’t be the icing on the cake of a consultation—it has to be baked into the entire process.

Think of person-centered care as care that’s designed around the individual. It respects individual preferences and values, involves family members, and reinforces shared decision making and goal setting.

Ida’s counseling tools allow professionals to better understand, motivate, and communicate with patients and engage them in their own treatment. These tools help establish a holistic approach to care and give a stronger voice to people with hearing loss throughout their treatments. Covering both adult rehabilitation and pediatrics, as well as specific topics such as tinnitus management and the cochlear implant journey, the tools are designed for audiologists, but many of them can also be used by speech-language pathologists.

Ida also offers a range of patient resources that help people manage hearing loss in daily life and empower them to them to play an active role in their care. The resources include Ida Telecare, a suite of online tools that patients and their communication partners can use to prepare for appointments from the comfort of their own home. The tools allow professionals to extend their services beyond the appointment and help patients think about their needs beforehand. This paves the way for more efficient appointments and allows professionals to focus on what really matters to the individual patient.

User-Driven Innovation

All Ida’s tools and resources are created through collaborative innovation processes and workshops involving people with hearing loss, clinicians, academics, and other experts. Inspired by design thinking, which focuses on creative problem solving, Ida’s innovation approach leads to resources that are developed by and for the people who use them. From ideation to creation and review, we draw on the skills and knowledge of diverse contributors who share our goal of improving hearing care through person-centered methods.

The Ida Institute was also among the first to introduce ethnographic video in hearing care and offers a rich collection of ethnographic films that provide insights into the thoughts, actions, and reactions of hearing care professionals, people with hearing loss, and their communication partners. The videos are used not only for innovation purposes but for training, as well; educators around the world use these popular resources to train students and professionals in delivering person-centered care.

Education on Person-Centered Care

To help hearing care professionals develop their person-centered skills, the institute provides online learning for students, professionals, and academics at all levels through the Ida Learning Hall. The Learning Hall offers a range of courses on topics such as Getting Started With PCC, Applying PCC in the Appointment, Tinnitus Management, and Tele-Audiology. The courses are free, [1] and ASHA members can use them to demonstrate professional development hours and certification maintenance hours.

Through Ida’s signature University Course, the institute also provides educators with lesson plans, handouts, and videos to ease the process of teaching PCC and Ida tools and to make the learning enjoyable.

All tools and resources from the Ida Institute are available for free from the Ida Institute website. Highlights of the institute’s tools include the following:

Counseling for Adults

Motivation Tools − Open a dialogue with your clients to better understand their needs and assess their motivation to improve their hearing.
Communication Partners − Help clients improve their communication in daily life by establishing common goals with family and friends.
My Hearing Explained – Use these tools to explain hearing test results in a practical way that clients find easy to understand and explain to others.

Counseling for Children

Telecare for Teens and Tweens − Help clients prepare for appointments by extending your care through online support and counseling.
My World − Help children manage their hearing loss by learning how to express their personal experiences in their own words.
Growing Up with Hearing Loss – Help families navigate different transitions from infancy to high school and beyond with videos, quizzes, and recommendations.

Patient Tools

Ida Telecare – Help people with hearing loss prepare for appointments and manage hearing loss in daily life.
Managing Hearing Loss at Work – Provide resources for people with hearing loss to help improve communication in the workplace.
Tinnitus First Aid Kit – Provide patients with information about tinnitus and how it affects them.

About the Author

Lise Lotte Bundesen is the Managing Director of the Ida Institute—an independent, nonprofit organization working with hearing care professionals and patients from around the world to develop and integrate person-centered practice in hearing care. Ms. Bundesen was the architect behind the creation of the institute in 2007. She has extensive experience in the fields of communication, education/training, ethics, and social responsibility and has worked in the health care arena for many years, specifically for the multinational company Novo Nordisk.

[1] An administrative fee of $10 USD applies if you wish to retrieve a digital course badge.