Face to face : Dimity Dornan
WHEN Brisbane speech pathologist Dimity Dornan last year said she hoped to help deaf children in remote areas of the world learn to listen and speak she never dreamed her hope would become reality so quickly.
Within a day of launching her innovative Listen Little Star kit to assist the parents of deaf newborns she had posted it off to a young family in a remote area of Alaska. “A Brisbane woman whose daughter lives there with her American husband rang me to say the couple’s new baby had been diagnosed as profoundly deaf and asked if we could help.”
It was the beginning of another success story for the dedicated founder and clinical director of Brisbane’s Hear and Say Centre, established 12 years ago and now recognised internationally for its work with deaf children, using the Auditory-Verbal approach.
Auditory-Verbal therapy assists deaf children to learn to speak through listening as well as involving technologies including hearing aids and cochlear implants.
The Hear and Say Centre, which receives $270 000 a year from the State Government, caters for 150 children, aged between birth to 20. Four other centres operate through regional Queensland.
The Listen Little Star kit is aimed at parents and caregivers of babies to six months and beginning listeners up to 12 months who are deaf or hard of hearing and who have been fitted with a hearing device.
It contains a series of lessons for learning language through living which parents and caregivers use over a six month period and replicates the Auditory-Verbal technique in practice at the Hear and Say Centre.
Ideally it should be used in conjunction with an Auditory-Verbal professional but can be used as a standalone tool for parents out of the range of professional help, such as those living in remote areas of Queensland.
The Listen Little Star kit was launched soon after Premier Peter Beattie last year announced the government would begin a program of free hearing tests for all newborn babies.
The Queensland Healthy Hearing Program was launched in January this year for high risk babies — premature babies and those with a family history of hearing problems — and from next year the program will be available to all new born babies in the state. Dimity sees the testing program as “a great boon for Queensland” and a major step forward for deaf children and their families.
“If you identify a baby with hearing loss, diagnose exactly what type of hearing loss it has and intervene with audiology and therapy before the age of six months that child has every chance of being the same as a hearing child.”
Dimity, who was named Queensland Australian of the Year in 2003, began planning Listen Little Star after garnering as much information as she could at conferences overseas (such as the Newborn Hearing Screening International Conference in Italy held every two years) and in her position on the board of Auditory Verbal International in the U.S.
“The first time I went to Italy I realised someone had to write a program for parents and professionals.
So we started our own parent-infant program two years ago.” “That’s when Listen Little Star was born.”
Listen Little Star is published by the Auditory- Verbal Learning Institute in Florida in the United States. It is now being translated into Spanish, Polish and Arabic and the program has been bought for use in Iran.
