Abstract
This article sets out a proposal for how one might expand hearing screening in school children so as to include testing of speech mastery. From 2008 to 2019, the Institute of Physiology and Pathology of Hearing (IPPH) implemented a program to screen the hearing of Polish children starting school, covering over 1 million children. Its success prompted the development of a screening model to cover the entire process of verbal communication. One result was the "Equal Start in Education", a program implemented from 2019 to 2022 in the Lublin province, otherwise known as the "Lublin Program for Early Detection and Therapy of Communication Disorders in Children Starting School". It was conducted by the University Children’s Clinical Hospital in Lublin and the Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, in cooperation with IPPH, and was designed to assess hearing, auditory processing, voice, and speech-language. The program was successful in addressing various issues related to the screening of all communication skills. Here we present findings from the program and propose a testing procedure used to evaluate speech. The screening procedure might be applied more widely in the future, and could diagnose those children requiring audiological and speech-language therapy.
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