UMaine Audiologist Booth at Special Olympics in China
Contact: Joe Carr at (207) 581-3571
ORONO — University of Maine audiologist Amy Booth has spent her career providing hearing services to underserved populations in this country and around the globe. Now, she is going to China as a member of an international team of health professionals providing audiology screenings and hearing aid assessments to one such group — Special Olympics athletes.
Booth was invited to the Special Olympics World Summer Games in Shanghai, Oct. 2-10, to provide training and to help implement the Healthy Hearing segment of the Special Olympics Healthy Athletes initiative. With more than 7,000 athletes competing in this summer™s Special Olympics World Games, Booth and her colleagues expect to do nearly 450 hearing screenings and hearing aid assessments a day.
“It was alarming for me to learn that this population was underserved (in hearing services),” says Booth, a faculty member in UMaine™s Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders. “Some of the athletes have not had their hearing tested before, yet many are at high risk for hearing disabilities.”
Booth™s work with Special Olympics began in 2003 at UMaine, the site of the Special Olympics Maine Summer Games. She and UMaine communication sciences and disorders graduate students provide the Healthy Hearing component of the state games.
Last year, she was the clinical director for the state of Maine at the Special Olympics USA National Games in Iowa.
“I™ve gone to developing countries to participate in mass screenings, but this is a case of services being offered as close to the athletic events as possible,” Booth says.
At the national and international games, Booth was involved in training other health professionals and students in how to set up an effective and efficient on-site audiology clinic. The work also involves the compilation of data that must be correctly entered into a Centers for Disease Control database — the largest database on the health of individuals with intellectual disabilities in the world.
Booth came to UMaine in 1997 from Gorgas Army Hospital in Panama, where she was chief of audiology. As coordinator and supervisor of the Conley Speech, Language and Hearing Center™s Audiology Clinic on campus, she works with graduate students to offer hearing evaluations, assistive listening device consultation and counseling.
She and her students annually collect used hearing aids to donate to Hear Now, a nonprofit program of the Starkey Foundation that assists low-income persons with hearing disabilities.
In 1999, Booth traveled to the Dominican Republic as part of an audiology team that helped fit 350 hearing aids as part of a humanitarian mission, sponsored by the Starkey Foundation.
“Service is important to me as an individual and to our department,” Booth says. “My work allows me to give students a more global perspective and shows them that they may be called upon to do missions of service in this profession.”