Understanding Barriers to Timely Diagnosis and Intervention Among Immigrant Children With Hearing Loss

Objective Identify the age at diagnosis and intervention of immigrant and/or non‐English‐speaking children with hearing loss (HL) and risk factors associated with delays. Identify barriers for non‐English‐speaking caregivers of deaf/hard‐of‐hearing children. Study Design Sequential mixed methods. Setting Tertiary care center in an urban city. Methods The analysis includes descriptive statistics, and 1‐way and 2‐way analysis of variance of the retrospective chart review. The quantitative study demonstrated foreign‐born experienced disparities, so we conducted semistructured interviews on a subset of non‐English‐speaking families in the cohort that was then thematically analyzed using a human‐centered design strategy. Results We divided 532 children into 3 groups: US‐born with English as the preferred language (N = 294), US‐born and non‐English language preferred (N = 173), and foreign‐born (N = 67). The laterality of HL and pure‐tone averages were similar among the groups (p = .972 and .071, respectively). Age at diagnosis and time to the intervention were significantly different (39.7, 31.5, 75.8 months, p