Acknowledgements: National Research Council (NRC TO 14-04) is gratefully acknowledged. Awareness among Sri Lankan first time mothers’ informal identification of newborns’ hearing difficulties and /or hearing disabilities by themselves

Abstract

Early identify of hearing difficulties and/or disabilities among newborns are very essential to provide or guide them to further management and/ or rehabilitation options as soon as possible. Hence it is vital step to natural growth of speech and language without any failures. For the study three (3) midwifes were selected by using cluster sampling method. Midwifes were asked to provide list of mothers who become first time mothers during last twelve months time. Sixty (60) mothers were selected by simple random sampling methods via the list of names which was given by midwifes of each district of western province. Selected mothers were asked to complete questioners. The questioner was mainly in two parts; including personal details and the knowledge of identification hearing difficulties among the infants. Based on the information which was given by participants data analyzed by manually. Manually analyzed data concluded that maternal awareness of the identification of hearing difficulties among infants was not affected by geographical area of the mothers or age of the mothers. But it was highly influenced by the level of education of the participants. Readiness or/ and willingness of the acceptance of the new information through professionals or social and public Medias are predisposed by Education level of the mothers‘. Even though they reached their Ordinary Level education, it was not helped to achieve satisfactory level of the score for the questionnaires regarding readiness or/ and willingness of the acceptance of the new information through professionals or social and public Medias of deification of newborns‘ hearing difficulties and /or hearing disabilities by themselves. Respectively it was below 75%. Further there should be national protocol to promote raising awareness among mothers to early identification of their newborns‘ hearing difficulties by themselves. Therefore, usage of island- wild data prevalence is must hence to create more convenient picture regarding the results of the study.