Welcome to the All About Audiology podcast. I’m your host Dr. Lilach Saperstein and in this episode we are going to be talking about the newborn hearing screening (NBHS) (as I have discussed in this article I wrote).

Now, one of the many hospital screenings that occur within the first day or two days of birth is the newborn hearing screening. The keyword is “screening” which means it’s a pass or fail kind of test. You either pass the screening or you don’t pass. It’s not a diagnostic test. A diagnostic test means that we are determining the specific type or degree or configuration of hearing loss and really getting a lot of information. The screening is just choosing a cutoff and saying anyone who passes this, we are calling it a “pass” and if they don’t we call it “fail”. They won’t tell you if there is a little bit of hearing loss, a lot of hearing loss, what kind of hearing loss… In other words just because the baby will fail the hearing screening, it doesn’t mean they have hearing loss. There can be other things going on and we will discuss it throughout this episode.

Also, even if the fail is accurate and there is a hearing loss, we still need to get more information about the type, degree and configuration. And if you have been listening to the podcast, we have discussed in previous episodes how important it is to understand the type, degree and configuration of a hearing loss in order to know which devices would be appropriate or what’s the best way to approach the rehabilitation process for the specific kind of hearing loss.

About the universal newborn hearing screening:

The universal newborn hearing screening is a means of identifying hearing loss as early as possible and it has been a very positive initiative throughout the world because early identification and intervention lead to better outcomes for deaf and hard-of-hearing children.

In the olden days before this universal newborn hearing screening was instituted, what would happen is that the first time a hearing loss or even deafness would be identified would be later on in the child’s life, maybe when they were two years old and weren’t speaking, or later on in their development when parents noticed they don’t always respond or hear softer sounds. So it would be identified through their behaviors and through noticing that a child wasn’t listening or wasn’t able to hear, but not at infancy. The reason that the universal newborn hearing screening is so valuable is because it can identify children who are deaf or hard-of-hearing much earlier on, right at the beginning of their life and get a full diagnosis and then implement interventions as early as possible to give the children language input.

Another thing that I have talked about on this show before, and it’s something that I’m very passionate about, is the problem of language deprivation. Now when I say language deprivation, I don’t necessarily mean spoken language, as speech, I am referring to other languages which can also include sign language.

One of the biggest detriments to deaf and hard-of-hearing children is language deprivation in the first 2-3 years of life which are the critical periods of language acquisition. If we identify a baby to have a hearing loss and that baby then gets a hearing aid or cochlear implant or other devices that will try to maximize their auditory potential,