By Eashaan Kappagantula | Donor Reporting Manager
Established a decade ago, in 2010, the Dhvani - Early Intervention Centre for Hearing Impaired is a unique project run by Save The Children India, a non-profit organization headquartered in BKC, Mumbai. The program has been developed with the aim of providing comprehensive care and support to young hearing impaired children and their families, hailing from all strata of society. We ensure this by way of providing them with state-of-the-art facilities, under one roof.
It is impressive to note that since its inception in 2010, Dhvani has successfully completed 382 new case OPD registrations so far (between January 2010 and December 2019).
There has been a significant influx of new children who have approached the Dhvani Early Intervention program over the last 3 months. These new children all fall in the age range of 4 months to 2 years, and have been referred to us by Wadia Hospital, and also by other medical professionals in the vicinity.
At Dhvani, all the children are made to undergo vigorous audiological and therapeutic evaluations, while also factoring in the more individualized requirements and needs of every child. Individual and group parent guidance and parent empowerment sessions are organized regularly, to loop in the parents of these children, to help them better deal with the initial phase of denial and grief, and to help them better understand how they can support their children and aid in their growth and learning. They are fitted with good quality hearing aids. When even good quality hearing aids do not help, then the candidacy criteria for cochlear implantation is checked for them, and they are provided complete guidance, pertaining to all the requisite medical and radiological assessments as per the need.
Collaborations go a long way in ensuring the continuity of the program, and it gives us immense pleasure to announce that we at Dhvani have collaborated with a range of institutes in the recent past, with the objective of providing internships to their students, and giving them a chance to work with STCI and Dhvani, to better understand the nuances of the program. The students from these institutes have enthusiastically been coming for their observation sessions since December 2019, and will continue to do so in the time to come.
Also to conduct Infant Hearing Screening Program, we are in the process of collaborating with different NGOs and organizations which are actively working in the area of Maternal & Child Care and Development. Additionally, we are also in the process of conducting a Hearing Screening camp in the geography of Vasai, with plans of expansion in the time to come.
Celebrations at Dhvani are not uncommon, with the latest in the series falling on the occasion of World Disability Day, where we conducted a Free Hearing Screening camp at Govandi. Approximately 25 children benefited from this camp. Parents of these children were made aware about basic ear hygiene and the importance of regular and routine hearing-screening camps, to ensure normal hearing sensitivity and age appropriate speech and language development.
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