Identify and Follow: Ajiri in Ibwinini​

Needs to be Addressed. This application is being submitted by the Center on Disability Studies at the University of Hawaii, on behalf, and in strong collaboration with the Ministry of Health in the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) to create a Identify and Follow: Ajiri in Ibwinini to make sure that babies identified in the Marshall Islands with a significant hearing loss are screened, evaluated, and provided the intervention services they need. This counting and tracking grant, in coordination with the HRSA newborn hearing screening grant, will ensure that those babies referred following screening, are not lost to follow-up, but receive the diagnostic and intervention services they need. Currently, the RMI has no universal system in place to track children with any type of disability or health condition. Database systems are just beginning to emerge.

Proposed Goal and Objectives. The project goal is to develop and maintain a sustainable, centralized, newborn hearing screening tracking and surveillance system capable of accurately identifying, matching, collecting, and reporting data on all occurrent births this is unduplicated, individually identifiable through screening, diagnosis, and early intervention.

The objectives are as follows.

• Develop national plan for a newborn tracking and surveillance information system.
• Obtain technical assistance to develop and electronic birth certificate.
• Develop a plan for implementation of newborn metabolic screening.
• Expand the system to include early childhood programs in the community.
• Incorporate childhood immunization data into information system.

Population to be Served. The population to be initially served are all children born over the next five years in the RMI. The data provided by this information and surveillance system will assist the Ministry of Health in planning to meet the needs of this population.

Management Plan. The plan will be under the supervision of the Principal Investigator (PI) at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. The PI has worked closely with the Ministry of Health to implement newborn hearing screening, and currently in another effort to develop a Community Parent Resource Center. The relationships and trust developed as part of those efforts led the Ministry of Health to request this assistance.

Evaluation. Evaluation will consist of a detailed methodology for continuous assessment of fidelity of implementation so that modifications can ensure that the project’s goals and objectives are accomplished and all young children with a significant hearing loss are identified, and through tracking, assurance is provided that they receive the follow-up and the intervention services needed. The evaluation will assess both process and performance indicators.

Principal Investigator: Raymond Miner