Objective

To apply a universal newborn hearing screening procedure in the Cuban’s neonatal population.

Materials and Methods

Technological development study using bibliographic review, interviewing key informants and consulting experts. For the implementation of the designed procedure, the universe consisted of all alive newborns of maternal hospitals in Cuba from January to December 2018. A simple random selection of three provinces was made; Pinar del Río, Camagüey and Guantánamo were selected. The multistage cluster sampling technique was used for hospital selection. The evaluation was carried out using instruments developed for this purpose by a group of 21 experts: 16 who participated in previous studies to identify problems and causes limitations of the research and design of the procedure, selected by applying the kappa coefficient, five participated in the implementation process and two advisors from the World Health Organization, for their international experience.

Results

Experts evaluated the favorable procedure in applicability, relevance, topicality, scientific level, efficiency and comprehensiveness and respond to a need; their outcomes allowed the integration to the National Hearing Impairment Program. The implementation allowed to get prevalence figures and risk factors for hearing impairment in the neonatal population of selected provinces.

Conclusions

The procedure for universal auditory screening in the neonatal population of Cuba is relevant and applicable, is pertinent and applicable, both in structure and process and provides valuable results with unknown diagnostic information of hearing losses in newborns with and without risk factors.

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