Quality Standard for Rehabilitation of Young Deaf Children Receiving Cochlear Implants.

More and more children with severe-to-profound hearing loss are receiving cochlear implants (CIs) at an early age to improve their hearing and listening abilities, speech recognition, speech intelligibility, and other aspects of spoken language development. Despite this, the rehabilitation outcomes can be very heterogeneous in this population, not only because of issues related to surgery and fitting or the specific characteristics of the child with his/her additional disabilities but also because of huge differences in the quality of the support and rehabilitation offered by the therapist and the family. These quality standards for the rehabilitation of young deaf children receiving CIs are developed within the European KA202 Erasmus+ project "VOICE"-vocational education and training for speech and language therapists and parents for the rehabilitation of children with CIs, Ref.