Knowledge on Cochlear Implants among Medical Students, Tanzania
Massawe Richard Enica1;Ntunaguzi Daudi;Ibrahim Abdul Hazali.
Background: Cochlear implantation is one of the most performed surgery worldwide currently to people mostly children with sensorineural hearing loss to solve the effects of severe to profound hearing loss and without this, these children would be left with deafness for life. Tanzania has also developed and started to perform cochlear implantation to children in 2017. Objective: The main aim of this study was to assess Knowledge on cochlear Implants among senior medical students and interns who are going to be the primary care providers and will be required to make proper diagnosis and referrals for children requiring cochlear implants to the right facilities for further management hence their knowledge is of great essence.Methodology: Descriptive cross sectional study was used, a structured questionnaire was used to collect data and Stratified random sampling method was used to get participants. Self-administered questionnaires was used for data collection and collected data was coded and analysed using IBM SPSS version 24.0.Results: In this study which involved 203 participants, we found that only 87.2% have ever heard about cochlear implants and only 80.2% knew that cochlear implants may restore hearing to the deaf and 11.3% did not know that children who received cochlear im-plant could learn spoken language also 35% of the participants did not know that cochlear implant is being done in Tanzania despite starting performing the surgery since 2017. More than half of the participants are knowledgeable to different candidacy criteria for cochlear implantation however only 23.2% of the participants knew that a child without a cochlear is not a candidate for cochlear implants. More than 90% of participants knew that Audiologist, Otolaryngologist and speech therapist are key members of cochlear implant team but only 65% knew that a social worker is also a member of the team. We also found that more than half of the partici-pants knew that infections, device failures, cerebral spinal fluid fistulas facial nerve paresis and cholesteatomas are complications associated with cochlear implantations. It was also found that there was an association between the university studied/studying and the level of knowledge, Majority of government owned university students having high knowledge while those of private owned having moderate knowledge.