Monitoring for newborn hearing screening programmes: an integrative review

In Brazil, hearing loss diagnosis does not occur in early years. Among various factors that could explain this fact is that the parents do not know well about hearing health for their children, and then do not attend for the follow-up. This literature review had as main goal to describe how the follow up has been done in Brazil, especially regarding to the audiologic exams, regarding to the follow up by the family, and regarding to educations activities for the health professionals. In order to achieve that, an integrative review of the literature was done, leaded by the question: How the audiologic follow up has been done for the newborn hearing screening programs? It was used the the following databases: Lilacs, Medline, IBECS and CidSaúde using combinations of the terms “follow-up studies”, “hearing” and “newborn screening”. Initially, 1130 articles were screened by titles and abstracts. Then, 21 full articles were pre-selected by title and summary. Twelve articles answered the question of this review. The results indicated that tests for hearing screening and audiologic were used more Evoked otoacoustic emissions and auditory brainstem response, and behavioral assessment, tympanometry and acoustic reflexes. Three studies reported the presence of educational programs and only one specified professionals realized that, being the nurse what else made these activities. The percentage of families who joined the monitoring varied considerably. It was interesting to see that those recommendations from local and international entities to perform the audiologic, seeking a standard of quality and effectiveness in the programs and the quality of the audiological evaluation.