The Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT) Department of the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital has performed a surgical operation that is aimed at restoring the hearing ability of five persons aged between seven months and 20 years.

Known as cochlear implant surgery, the procedure, which is rare in Ghana, involves fixing an electronic device that restores sound inside the ears of individuals with severe-to-profound hearing loss.

Thereafter, with the aid of an external device, patients who had been impaired in one ear are able to hear.

The entire surgical procedure and devices, which would have cost about $22,000 for one ear for each patient, were sponsored by Qatar Charity Ghana, who also sponsored the coming into the country of the lead ENT surgeon, Professor Abdulkareem K. Al-Balasi, a Senior ENT and Cochlear Implant Consultant at the Faculty of Medicine, Dhamar University, Yemen.

The team from the ENT Department at Korle Bu that joined Professor Al-Balasi to perform the surgeries included otologists, audiologists, speech and language therapists, ENT and theatre nurses and anaesthetic team.

Briefing journalists after successfully performing one of the five surgeries last Tuesday, the Chief Audiologist at the Hearing Assessment Centre of the hospital, Jemima Fynn, described hearing loss in children as more debilitating because it does not allow them to develop optimally, acquire language, develop psychologically, socially and economically to be viable in society.

Causes

She said children could suffer hearing loss as a result of issues that occurred during childbirth, trauma, infections and neonatal jaundice.

She pointed out that once identified early, they were able to start interventions aimed at correcting the problem.

Unfortunately, she added, because the country did not have the equipment for identifying hearing loss early and it is often parents who report the cases.

“So our issue is that we are identifying our children very late. Most of the time, by the time they come, they are about three, four years, so they have already lost a lot of time and the impact is always very severe,” she explained.

Ms Fynn said cochlear implantation started in Ghana in 2021, adding that currently, they have about 22 patients.

She said currently, the patients pay themselves by either going to look for funds themselves to pay or pay through their own pocket, pointing out that the procedure was quite expensive because everything had to be imported.

She was, therefore, grateful to Qatar Charity Ghana for sponsoring the five patients who were all from Tamale.

Sponsorship

The Health Project Coordinator of Qatar Charity, Dr Abubakar Inusah Hudu, said aside from the cochlear implants, his organisation had been sponsoring other health-related projects such as heart and eye screening and cataract eye surgery that was recently done for about 100 patients at Madina Polyclinic.

Explaining why they sponsor health-related projects, he said Islam teaches about helping the less privileged, and so by helping those children, they were fulfilling the wishes of Allah.

Professor Al-Balasi, who is renowned globally for cochlear implant surgeries, said one month after the cochlear implantation, the audiologist would activate the device, adding that during that period, rehabilitation, which involved therapy sessions with speech and language therapists as well as an audiologist, was very important to be able to get more benefit from the device.