KU alumna brings free hearing aids, services and equipment to Jordan
When KU alumna Safa Alqudah graduated with a doctorate in audiology in 2016, she took with her an important lesson: The value of listening to students.
Shortly after returning to her home country of Jordan and accepting a position as a faculty member at the Jordan University of Science and Technology, students came to Alqudah frustrated that they didn’t have the proper equipment to gain the clinical knowledge they needed.
“Something I took from KU’s faculty members is that you have to listen to your students in order to understand their problems,” Alqudah said.
A former Applied English Center student, Alqudah’s training through KU’s Intercampus Program in Communicative Disorders also taught her how to set up a hearing and speech clinic properly.
“So, when I returned to Jordan, I found that our clinic was not complete. That there was still a lot of work that needed to be done,“ Alqudah said.
After her university told her that a shortfall in the university’s budget meant it couldn’t at that time provide funding to equip the hearing and speech clinic, Alqudah discovered Hear the World, a nonprofit Swiss foundation that supports projects in low- to middle-income countries to give children with hearing loss access to audiological care.
In 2020, Alqudah received $700,000 for Hear Jordan, a project she developed that takes a three-prong approach to address hearing loss by providing free hearing aids and evaluations to children who can’t afford them, training audiology students with the proper equipment and implementing a public awareness campaign.
Through the project, the clinic will perform thousands of free hearing evaluations for low-income children and refugees, many of whom have hearing damage from the explosions of weapons. It will also provide 400 hearing aids, their accessories and a two-year battery supply to those populations.
The project is important, Alqudah said, because Jordan’s health insurance doesn’t fully cover audiological services. For instance, health insurance will pay for a hearing aid in only one ear, which is detrimental to a child’s language acquisition. Along with providing hearing aids, the Hear Jordan project will provide free speech therapy services.
The funding also allows for a public awareness campaign to educate Jordanians on hearing loss, its signs and symptoms, steps to prevent it and where to seek treatment.
For Alqudah, one of the most important elements of the project is the support to properly train Jordan’s next generation of audiologists. Jordan University of Science and Technology is one of three institutions in the country to offer audiology training, and the only one in northern Jordan.
“Our students can’t get good training because the equipment is broken,” Alqudah said. “So by buying this new equipment our students can train to be skillful audiologists.”
The desire for Jordan to have more audiology specialists is what brought Alqudah to KU’s Intercampus Program in Communicative Disorders in 2012. The program brings together the Department of Speech-Language-Hearing: Sciences and Disorders on the Lawrence campus and the Department of Hearing and Speech on the KU Medical Center campus.
Alqudah spent her six months in Lawrence, where she took writing courses at the Applied English Center as well as those pertinent to her major.
During her time at KU, Alqudah said she learned how to be better organized, became more independent and made friends from around the world. Alqudah continues to keep in touch with KU colleagues and faculty members, something she advises others to do.
“When you start your career as a faculty member you need the knowledge of experienced faculty members. When you have a connection you are able to do a lot for yourself,” Alqudah said.