Individual weekly one hour sessions for families in the school programme, in order to teach parents how to facilitate language on a daily basis in their own home.
This same service is offered to families who live further away or whose hearing impaired children are in normal nursery schools. Further away is anything from within Pretoria to towns up to 6 hours away; or even across the South African borders.
This department is also one of very few Centre based Auditory-Verbal Therapy (A-V) providers. The gold standard therapy approach for children receiving cochlear implants and hearing aids early in their lives. Our in-house therapist is a mentor with “Listening and Spoken Language South Africa” an organization involved in bringing the A-V methodology to South African families by training more therapists.
Our Skype Intervention Programme has come about because we also serve families in many African countries where these services are either very limited or not available. The family has an hour intervention session via Skype.
Countries currently served in this programme include: Angola, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Kenya, the United Arab Emirates and Namibia (our pilot SkIP programme is running in these three countries)
We were part of a Masters student’s published academic research and as a result we initiated our SkIP project.
Our children who attend schools in their local neighbourhood often require additional support to help keep them on par with their peers – additional language and remedial support is offered to these children. We are very reliant on outside therapists for assistance in this programme.
This project works to support ex-pupils of the programme until they matriculate. With the right kind of support many hearing impaired teens will matriculate and go on to study further and follow a career.
These young people, despite being ‘disabled’ in the public’s eyes, are often times as able as their hearing counterparts – sometimes bringing other skills to the table. Since the beginning of 2014, our parent guidance department has become the sole service provider for practical services for University of Pretoria – Audiology final year students in both Auditory-Verbal and Auditory-Oral methodologies of parent guidance for families of hearing impaired children