While cochlear implants have been done in different parts of the Caribbean in small numbers, they are now available in Trinidad and Tobago.
Cochlear implants have been around since the 1950s in a very basic form.
A cochlear implant is an electronic device that can help people with severe hearing loss from inner-ear damage for whom hearing aids are not helpful. Hearing aids amplify sound, but cochlear implants bypass the damaged organs in the ear to deliver sound directly to the auditory nerve.
Prof Howard Francis, a specialist in otolaryngology (ear, nose and throat) at Duke University in the US, and Dr Solaiman Juman, ENT consultant at the Eric Williams Medical Sciences Centre, have collaborated with the St Augustine Private Hospital to do cochlear implants.
Earlier this year, the team did its sixth and seventh implants, the latest for a teenage patient.
Immediately after that surgery, the two surgeons and their team sat with Newsday to chronicle their journey.
Francis said, "I have had the privilege over the last several years to be asked by Dr Juman to help him in developing a programme that serves the people of TT in managing severe to profound hearing loss in all age groups.
"Today we would have done our sixth and seventh cochlear implant since we started collaborating several years ago."
His role as a consultant, he explained, is "to develop the skill set here in TT – a surgical skill set, but also a multi-disciplined team skill set, which is really critical in achieving success, especially in the very young."
[caption id="attachment_1036113" align="alignnone" width="691"] Professor Howard Francis is a specialist in otolaryngology (ear, nose and throat) at Duke University in the US. - Photo by Angelo Marcelle[/caption]
He said he has worked with an audiologist, speech and language pathologists and paediatricians to develop "a comprehensive programme that is small but growing and is amongst the most capable in the Caribbean." The procedure is now standard in the US, Europe, Australia and other countries for the management of severe to profound sensorineural hearing loss. That is, he said: "Hearing loss that would not be addressed with hearing aids alone, because the quality of that (sound) is so poor and so broken that a young child would not have the ability to use that broken signal to learn how to listen and speak. Such a child would function in other ways.
"(But) if a family is interested in giving that child the ability to listen and attend schools where communication is verbal rather than sign, then a cochlear implant gives them the best opportunity." He warned that the results of the implant are much more likely to succeed if the intervention is done very early in life – preferably by the time the patient is two.
"For that to happen, it requires that we have better screening of newborns, because you want to identify these kids well before they are six months of age. Get them started with hearing aids and therapy and have an implant ideally before a year of age, and certainly tr
