Doha: Qatar Red Crescent Society (QRCS) has launched an early hearing detection and intervention programme for newborns in Gaza, with a budget of $647,000.
It was announced during a workshop held in Gaza City, in the presence of representatives of the programme’s partners the Palestinian Ministry of Health (MoH) and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) as well as a number of institutions concerned with health care and disability in Gaza governorates.
At the beginning of the workshop, Dr. Akram Nassar, Head of QRCS’s representation office in Gaza, said the launch of this programme came as a result of extensive work done by the QRCS for over three years now.
For the first time in Gaza, hearing detection and intervention services for newborns are available at primary health care centres, which helps to increase the chances of rehabilitation of the social integration of patients as well as minimise the costs of rehabilitation.
According to him, the real success is the design and linkage of the programme to the vaccination process at 10 primary health care centres of MoH and UNRWA, to ensure optimal coverage and outreach to as many cases as possible. Later on, the programme is planned to transform into a comprehensive national programme that will cover all Gaza centres in the future.
He stressed that the organisers, mainly MoH, were in the process of developing a national hearing detection protocol, to serve as a reference for workers in the field.
A computerised programme was developed to link all the centres involved in the project, to ensure effective communication and data management, storage, and analysis. This will provide decision-makers with necessary information to frame and update health policies in the coming period.
Dr. Abdul-Latif Al Hajj, Director-General of International Cooperation at Palestine’s MoH, said the ministry continued its work in partnership with QRCS to ensure the success of these significant interventions.
This includes training local staff at primary health care centres in methods of early examination and providing centres with hearing examination equipment with a view to helping to identify the cases with hearing disability and facilitating their rehabilitation and social integration.
In his remarks about the reality of hearing disability in Gaza, Naim Kabaja, Executive Director of Atfaluna Association for the Deaf in Gaza, gave an overview of the main problems suffered by the people with hearing disability in Gaza, including severe living conditions due to blockade and repeated wars, which result in considerable difficulty of adaption and integration.
He pointed out that early detection of hearing disabilities helped to ensure rehabilitation, training, and treatment that would achieve healthy development of children with hearing disability.
To him, the new programme is a serious step towards a well-designed hearing detection and examination system in Gaza.
