Goal fulfilment in school for the deaf and hearing impaired - batod

Model for implementationOne necessary condition for implementing theevaluation project has been the ability to identifythe pupils and young people included in thetarget group and to collect the necessary detailsabout them.Our starting point in this project has been atotal population model since the target group issmall and, as such, susceptible to non-response.We also chose this model since, in recent years,results have been reported that have been basedon major international collections of data inthe field (Gallaudet… 2005; Stacey et al. 2006;Thoutenhoofd 2006; ADPS 2007).By compiling a register of hearing impaired anddeaf pupils, an evaluation could be made, notonly of the types of school(s) as was the initialpurpose, but also of descriptive habilitating dataso that the combination of hearing habilitationand education was made. As already mentioned,special schools have the goal of working inaccordance with the governing documents, butthere are at the same time an increasing numberof more or less habilitating goals that are linkedto choice of school and educational content.The model was based on all hearing centresvoluntarily participating in this assessment andsubmitting to Statistics Sweden (SCB) the civicregistration numbers of all the deaf and hearingimpaired pupils in the age group in questionin Sweden. As instructed by the SPM, SCBtherefore gathered civic registration numbersand sent out questionnaires to parents andschools. The SPM also initiated a campaign bywhich, through notices, information to userorganisations and advertising in user journals andthe daily press, they told the target group aboutthe project.The expected occurrence of hearing loss requiringhabilitation is 0.1% to 0.4% per year cohort,and in our assessment the percentage of civicregistration numbers varied between 0.13% bornin 1986 up to 0.33% born in 1991. As appearsin diagram 1, we have probably succeeded ingathering together a very large proportion of thegroup in question for those born 1988‐1998Regarding the oldest age groups, however, thenumber of civic registration numbers per agegroup is too low to be significant. We judgedthat the reason for this is that older pupils donot have the same kind of contact with theaudiological health care service as they did whenthey were younger; the health service refers to itas ‘deregistered patient data’.The details of the older pupils have sometimesbeen taken over by other units within the sameclinic. For the youngest group, born in 1999, itis not so easy to understand the low number. Apossible explanation could be that the number ofhearing check-ups at the age of 4 has decreasedwhile the screening of new-born children hasbeen introduced and extended (HRF 2007).According to one study, it is possible that about95% of all hearing impairments are discoveredby the age of 8 (Van Naarden, Decouflé &Caldwell 1999). We believe all the same thatthe year cohorts born in 1988-1998 provide arelatively good picture of the occurrence of deafand hearing impaired children. For these elevendifferent age groups, the prevalence was 2.8 perthousand (95% confidence interval 2.7‐3.0).Table 3. Collection from hearing centres.RowNumber1 No. of civic reg. nos. 1986-1999 39852 Of which born 1986-1990 13133 Of which born 1991-1999 2672Goal fulfilment in school for the deaf and hearing impaired27