RP305 - Effects of Cultural, Emotional, Burden, and Accessibility Factors on Self-Reported Hearing Health Disparity Scores in Hispanic Individuals

Abstract:
A carefully created health disparity survey was administered in various community settings, obtaining information from Hispanic individuals of diverse origins and citizenship. All listeners were asked to provide information on age, noise on the job, self-perceived hearing loss, and access to healthcare. The survey aimed to address the problem of access and affordability of hearing healthcare among Hispanic individuals and covered four domains: culture, burden, emotion, and accessibility. We found, older individuals had 4x likelihood risk of higher disparity score than younger individuals.

Summary:
Rationale
According to the hearing health inequalities model (Tsimpida et. al., 2021), four factors contribute to hearing disparities among younger and older listeners with hearing loss. These include fundamental causes, environmental influences, and individual experience, which collectively lead to inequalities in terms of well-being, healthy life expectancy, and mobility issues. These factors can be broken into subcategories: social, political, economic, physical, learning, and cultural. People of Hispanic/ Latin X ethnicity represent 17% of the entire population and often lack access to health care due to financial, language, and immigration issues.

Methods
A total of 26 participants completed a health disparity survey in community settings where information was gathered from Hispanic individuals of diverse origins and citizenship. In a previous study by Desjardins in 2021, almost a quarter of all self-surveyed Hispanic individuals reported they could not afford hearing aids and perceived that their hearing status did not warrant amplification. Prior to completing the survey, all listeners were asked to provide information on age, noise on the job, self-perceived hearing loss, and access to healthcare. To address the problem of access and affordability among Hispanic individuals, a health disparity survey was carefully crafted with questions covering four domains: culture, burden, emotion, and accessibility.

Results and Conclusions
Based on the self-reported responses in the four domains above, each individual obtained a total disparity score. Individuals were categorized into low and high disparity scores based on the mean and standard deviation. To find a relationship between two nominal variables in this study (age and disparity score), a chi-square analysis was utilized. Based on age, survey responses were analyzed across 15 younger (less than 44 years of age) and 11 older (greater than 45 years of age). Results of Pearson chi square value of 4.54 and probability value of 0.033 indicating a significant affect of age. In data analysis, we found, older individuals had 4x likelihood risk of higher disparity score than younger individuals. We speculate with advancing age the probability of hearing loss and lack of access is contributing to this finding.

Brief Summary of Clinical Takeaways: The clinical takeaway from this session is to understand the hearing healthcare disparities in Hispanic cultures and utilize this information to provide a holistic care approach.