Our Education Program got underway in the second week of our Vietnam Summer Training Program. We have seven professionals from the Global Foundation For Children With Hearing Loss here working with the Vietnamese teachers and therapists in early intervention, kindergarten classroom, and auditory-verbal therapy.
The goal of the two-week course is to help the Level 4 therapists and teachers continue to progress in their knowledge and skills for helping young children with hearing loss under 6 years of age learn to listen and talk. The Vietnamese are learning about child development, speech and language assessment, and how to set goals and strategies to help children with hearing loss overcome developmental delays to catch up to normal hearing peers. The two week course combines time for theory and planning with live sessions with young children to carry out the elements that they are learning.
Meanwhile, on the Audiology side, three audiologists and an audiology graduate student from the Global Foundation For Children With Hearing Loss are working with our intermediate and advanced level audiology technicians. The goal here is to further skills in pediatric testing for hearing loss and diagnosis, hearing aid fitting, and case management. There are about 90 children enrolled in the Education program who have been scheduled to come in last week and this coming week for hearing evaluations by the Vietnamese technicians with guidance and oversight from the Global Foundation audiologists. 
Aside from the training, we have secured additional audiology equipment for one of the regional audiology centers that we have targeted to support. This center’s technicians have received training from the Global Foundation over the years and are already complementing services provided by clinics in Ho Chi Minh City with a modicum of audiology care to children in the rural region surrounding the school outside the city. Our efforts to boost the equipment resources there will have an immediate positive impact.
All the courses in our Summer Training Program across audiology and education take place at Thuan An Center. This enables our Global Foundation professionals to emphasize the importance of teaming and working together across functions to address the needs of children with hearing loss. There have been instances this past week where a child was not performing well in her therapy or classroom sessions. In other instances, the technicians needed more information about how a given child is hearing in everyday life. We are encouraging the teachers, therapists, and audiology technicians in our program to connect with each other about such cases so they can troubleshoot and address situations together.