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SWAZI EARCARE

Haydn Crocker, a qualified audiologist from the UK, has flown out to Swaziland to start the EarCare project. With his partner Lisa, Haydn is currently going about setting up the audiology clinic at Mbabane Hospital and is also training two nurses to become audiology practitioners.

As soon as the clinic is established, patients will be able to be screened for hearing impairments, a new service provided by Sound Seekers with the help of its range of supporters. The new service will add to the range of healthcare facilities under the auspices of the Swazi Ministry of Health.

Sound Seekers has raised many thousand of pounds from supporters in the UK to enable the Swazi EarCare project to go ahead.

HARK FOR LESOTHO
(HARK means Hearing Assessment and Research Centre)

On July 19th, the HARK! vehicle for Lesotho arrived in Durban. It is currently en route to Lesotho where it will be attached to the Queen Elizabeth 11 Hospital in Maseru. The HARK!, staffed by a crew of two nursing sisters, will be able to visit isolated rural areas and provide a deaf and hearing impairment screening service.

The HARK! project with a capital cost of over £100,000 will provide a much needed service and it is anticipated that the HARK! will be "on the road" in the very near future.

AMT Course at Kyambogo University, Kampala

In July, the AMT course started at the Kyambogo University. Students from various countries in the developing Commonwealth will be able to learn repair, maintenance and fault-funding techniques for both hearting aids and audiology equipment. The need to train professional staff to repair and maintain increasingly sophisticated equipment is paramount.

NEW PROJECT

EarCare India 2003

A joint venture with the Sylvia Wright Trust to make available a complete audiological unit, including a clinic, earmould laboratory and hearing aid repair laboratory for the new Sylvia Wright Trust Hospital at Athiyandhal in Madras State. The project also seeks to provide a group hearing aid facility at the Trust’s Rangammal Memorial School for the deaf as well as hearing aids for all the pupils.

The Hospital is in desperate need of a HARK! vehicle which can form part of the hospitals frontline services to reach the deaf and hearing impaired in the deprived rural areas. A vehicle has been found and will be transported to India in the very near future.

The Society needs to raise over £300,000.00 to fulfil its commitment to the Sylvia Wright Trust. For further information, call Sound-Seekers on 020 7233 5805.

HARK! Uganda
The Sound Seekers first HARK! mobile clinic (Hearing Assessment and Research Centre) is based upon a Land Rover field ambulance; it carries its own power generator, water supply, diagnostic equipment and refrigeration unit for medicines. It is also sound proofed so as to allow hearing to be screened accurately and, whereas it is deployed from Mulago Hospital, Kampala its work takes place in rural towns and villages many kms away from the nearest clinics.

HARK! allows its team, of at least 2 qualified audiologists,to screen children who are deaf, refer those who require surgery and educate families about the prevention of deafness. During one recent week on the road, the Uganda HARK! team was able to assess and treat 600 children from the rural Iganga district  who would otherwise have received no attention at all.  Of these 600, a disquieting 247 required medical treatment for the serious infective disease of the ear, chronic otitis media.  A further 21 children benefited from the fitting of hearing aids.

HARK! Western Cape of South Africa

Such is the success of HARK! Uganda, that in April 1999, Sound Seekers delivered its second HARK! vehicle to Africa.  This time deaf children of the townships, informal settlements and isolated rural villages in the Western Cape of South Africa are benefiting from the unique HARK! Service.

The project is run in partnership with the University of Cape Town (UCT) and based at the Deaf Child Centre (DCC) in Rondebosch - itself part of the Child Health Unit of the University. HARK! is supervised by the Director DCC, who is assisted by the 2 audiologists who are funded by the Society and a third by UCT.

A close liaison has been established between the Society's Chief Executive and the Director DCC and she in turn with the Regional Directorate of the Department of Health, which recommended a phased approach to implementation whereby 2 of the 4 health regions of the Western Cape were serviced initially - primary and secondary health care sites within the Metropole and Boland/Overberg regions. As a result HARK! created a regular programme of visits to clinics in the rural areas. This has been extended to the Southern Cape/Karoo region and, more recently, into the West Coast/Winelands region. The HARK achievements have been complemented by the Department of Health, which has now created speech and hearing therapist posts in all 4 regions - a deliberate strategy to reinforce the HARK initiatives.

Two specific and essential needs have been identified in the past year, whilst HARK has been deploying to rural clinics: training and medical intervention. First, the need for more training in hearing impairment and its prevention for primary health care nurses, especially, and other health professionals is being answered by a formal initiative being established between HARK and the Department of Laryngology UCT, so that a comprehensive training programme is delivered. Second, data recorded shows that the majority of children seen by HARK are presenting with middle ear pathologies and these children require medical intervention; ENT specialists have accompanied HARK to most sites since 2001.

In April 2002 this HARK project was handed over to the University of Cape Town which is now fully responsible for sustaining the programme. It continues to develop well and expand its services.

For more detail of the work of HARK! in the Western Cape of South Africa, including the objectives to be achieved, see www.uct.ac.za/depts/chu/dcc.htm.

HARK! Eastern Cape of South Africa
Under the host-nation guidance of the University of Cape Town, our HARK! partner, this programme was launched in July 2000. It was arranged with the Department of Health at Bisho, which it is hoped will be able to sustain it once established.

The HARK! equipment and vehicle are standard and 2 professional audiologists are employed to run it. It is based at the Frere Hospital in East London and it deploys into the former Transkei and Ciskei, visiting rural clinics.

On 6 August 2002, this HARK was involved in a very serious traffic accident outside East London; HARK was overtaken by a "bakkie" on the wrong side of a double white line, and hit in the front by a spinning BMW. It has been written off, but our staff survived with superficial injuries. The Society awaits a replacement vehicle.

December 2001: HARK! NAMIBIA - the latest news!

1. A partnership has been established between Sound Seekers - CSD - and the Association for Children with Language, Speech and Hearing Impairments of Namibia (CLaSH). This NGO, based in Windhoek Namibia, will act as Implementing Agency for the HARK project.

2. A Memorandum of Understanding has been signed by the Ministry of Health and Social Services in Namibia, with the Society. Its support for the HARK programme includes a responsibility for all fuel and the servicing of the HARK vehicle, and a declared intention to continue the programme following the HARK pilot project.

3. As a result of national advertising, two senior nurses from the Oshakati Hospital have been selected to operate the HARK project which itself will be based at this Hospital. They are to begin a 'training for role' programme at the University of Cape Town early in January 2002. In the meantime, following the sponsorship first of the shipping company 'MACS Maritime', and subsequently by 'Transworld Cargo' in Windhoek, the HARK vehicle will sail in the 'Diamond Land' from Tilbury to Walvis Bay on 19 December, and then by road to Windhoek.

Once the nurses have returned from training and the HARK vehicle and its equipment join them, there is a great deal of administrative and logistical planning to be undertaken in the office which has been allocated within the Oshakati Hospital.

The aim of screening children for impaired hearing and referrals to health centres and hospitals for infective middle ear disease in a very large Health Department Region, requires careful programming. Once established, this new network, in support of rural clinics, will gradually increase to provide a service which has never been offered hitherto.

July 2001: New HARK! for the Eastern Cape

The aim of Sound Seekers' third HARK! project is to develop appropriate systems for early detection, and intervention, in hearing impaired children from disadvantaged communities.

The Eastern Cape lies adjacent to the Western Cape, south of Johannesburg and south west of KwaZulu Natal.  It includes the former homelands of Transkei, Ciskei, and Cape Province, about which we heard so much during the latter years of Apartheid.  Its population of 6.4 million - 16% of the whole country, and the third largest province - is among the poorest: it is also the Province with the highest poverty gap.  Sadly, the province suffers the highest rate of disability in the country, with 9% against a provincial average of 6% and, to compound this, over 48% unemployment.

The Public Health Department and DEAFSA ( The South Africa Federation for the Deaf) estimated a population of deaf people in the Province of some 440,000, 85% of whom are 15 years of age and below.

This new HARK project arrived in the Eastern Cape in August 2000, and has been based at the Frere Hospital in East London. The Society has been fortunate not only to recruit the first audiologist to lead this team but to enlist the help of the Deputy Director, of the Department of Health at Bisho - who has arranged the fuelling and servicing of the vehicle by the Department - but also the senior ENT surgeon at the hospital to oversee the project. The Director of HARK in the Western Cape, who is also Director of UCT's Deaf Child Centre at Rondebosch, continues to provide a consultative role in the Eastern Cape; thus the Society maintains a dynamic relationship with the University of Cape Town.

If funds can be raised, a fourth HARK project may be feasible, in Namibia this time, through a new relationship which the Society hopes to develop with the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare and CLaSH, a charity working in support of children with language difficulties in Windhoek.

The Society is also well advanced with the planning of a comprehensive audiology project in Swaziland, which aims to replicate Earcare 2000, the project which was completed in Guyana in 1999. Funding, however, is urgently required.