For a population of 42million Ugandans, there are only 49 Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT) medical specialists. As they marked world hearing day on Tuesday, the specialists under their umbrella the ENT Society in Uganda complained about working long hours and being overwhelmed by the number of patients.
Dr. Fred Bisso, an ENT consultant considering ears, for each patient one requires to pay a lot of attention as some conditions present without symptoms; a specialist will take not less than three hours if they are to thoroughly examine a patient.
But he says this doesn’t happen in many facilities because doctors have to see many patients in a short time. As a result, he says some end misdiagnosing patients making conditions that would have been solved by simple antibiotics deteriorate into requiring surgery or use of hearing aids.
He says this is worsened by the fact that in absence of ENT specialists, government has been hesitant to recruit ENT diploma holders even as many of them have recently trained.
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He said the commonest cause of hearing impairment in Uganda has to do with people trying to remove wax from their ears.
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To him, some children end up dropping out of school even when their condition can be corrected.
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For those that choose to go for surgery to have hearing aids implanted, they have to part with a lot of money, a reason as to why some don’t seek care even as most hearing challenges are treatable.
Dr. Christopher Ndolerire, who heads the ENT fraternity and is a lecturer at Makerere University, says surgery for hearing loss has just started in Uganda and goes for about $18,000 (more than Shs60million).
He anticipates this may go lower with a recent promise by government to have tax waivers on hearing devices. They currently conduct an average of six cochlear operations each year although Ndolerire says their aim when the operation was being introduced in Uganda in 2017 was to treat 50 to 100 people with severe impairment a year.
World Hearing day was marked under the theme, “Hearing for Life. Don’t let hearing loss limit you”. This year was the third time the day is being commemorated in Uganda despite it being long sent up by World Health Organization to increase awareness about hearing impairment.
Policy makers and stakeholders in ears related issues in Uganda are still largely unaware about it. For instance, the Commissioner for community Health Services in the Ministry Health in whose docket hearing disability falls confessed only learning about such a day this morning as he was being asked to officiate at the function. Two Million Ugandans suffer from a form of hearing loss, according to MOH statistics.
Story by Flavia Nassaka
