The Ida Institute, Naerum, Denmark, has announced that the Rehabilitation R&D Service of the Veterans Administration has awarded funding for a pilot study that will explore whether the Ida Motivation Tools and motivational interviewing techniques can help patients make the behavioral changes necessary to ensure positive hearing aid use.
|
| The Ida Institute offers a wide array of tools for dispensing professionals, including its Motivational Tools for use in patient counseling. |
Samantha Lewis, PhD, staff investigator at the US Department of Veterans Affairs’ National Center for Rehabilitative Auditory Research and assistant professor in the Department of Otolaryngology at the Oregon Health and Science University, is the principal investigator for the project titled “Applying the Use of Motivational Tools to Auditory Rehabilitation.” The Motivational Tools will be used as a means to explore and address patients’ prioritization of and confidence in hearing aids.
“We are pleased that the Veterans Administration has seen the value of conducting research on the potential for positive outcomes with the Motivational Tools,” says Ida Managing Director Lise Lotte Bundesen. “We look forward to the study results that will help us to provide clinicians with the outcome data needed to further expand use of the Motivational Tools in private and public clinics around the world.”
Lewis, who received training from the Ida Institute on the use of the Motivational Tools, will conduct the pilot study at the US Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Portland, Ore. The study will be a randomized clinical trial, where unsuccessful hearing aid users will be randomized to either receive a motivational interviewing intervention (treatment group) or review standard literature with an audiologist (control group).
One method will provide the control group with routine information regarding the care and use of hearing aids, which is the standard of care. In the treatment group, the Motivational Tools will be used to address patient-specific barriers to and motivators for successful hearing aid use.
The study hypothesizes that the use of the motivational counseling technique will result in greater hearing aid use and better hearing aid outcomes. Through the pilot study, researchers will look to identify information crucial for conducting a large-scale randomized trial exploring the use of proposed motivational intervention as a means for improving hearing aid use, and potentially other patient outcomes.
In her application for the VA RR&D funding, Lewis notes the easy transition of the Motivational Tools from the laboratory to the clinic “is a strength of this proposal, as it could result in immediate improvements for our Veterans with hearing loss who are currently having a difficult time adjusting to hearing-aid use.”
Audiologists participating in the study are receiving training from health behavior coaches about interviewing techniques and the use of Ida’s Line tool, as well as motivational interviewing principles found in Miller & Rollnick’s book, Motivational Interviewing.
According to an article on the Ida Institute Web site by Tim Cooke, the data collection will start in October 2013 and proceed until 2015. The goal is to collect data from 30 patients in the treatment group and 30 patients in the control group. Outcome measures collected will include an assessment of hearing aid use, a hearing aid questionnaire, an assessment of importance and readiness to change, two self-efficacy surveys, and an open-ended interview.
“By the conclusion of the project, we will have collected a lot of valuable data on what works well and what does not work as well to motivate patients to use their hearing aids,” states Lewis in the article.
Source: Ida Institute
