Quality assurance of a universal newborn hearing screening. Recommendations of the German Society of Phoniatrics and Pediatric Audiology

: Statutory implementation of a universal newborn hearing screening requires a continuous quality assurance monitoring. Therefore, at the Annual Meeting in 2007, the members of the German Society of Phoniatrics and Pediatric Audiology passed a recommendation on measures of quality assurance applied to newborn hearing screening. This recommendation describes the procedures, performance, location, time frame, and technical prerequisites of the screening and of potentially necessary follow-ups, the definition of hearing loss to be detected, the performing and responsible professional groups and their qualifications for the screening, the regulation of repeat and control screenings, the confirmation diagnostics and initiation of therapy, the information of parents, the documentation of screening results, the aims and organization of a tracking system, the tasks of regional screening centers and of a supraregional institution for the quality assurance of the hearing screening, the central collection of person and screening-related quality relevant data, and the accessibility of defined data sets as predisposition for cost analyses and quality reports.