A national hearing provider has opened at Fountain Gate centre offering multilingual services.
With close to one in four Australian residents speaking a language other than English at home, accessing supportive health services can sometimes be a challenge.
But linguistically diverse residents in South East Melbourne will have an easier way to get their hearing checked, with two new Hearing Australia centres officially opening in Fountain Gate and Glen Waverley, offering multilingual audiologist services.
Research also shows that one in four Australians are expected to experience some form of hearing loss by 2050 , the new centres will provide critical hearing services to the local community.
Audiologist Rohina Nejati, who is part of the Fountain Gate Hearing Australia team speaks five languages other than English, including Dari, Hazaragi, Persian, Urdu and Hindi.
“I am originally from Afghanistan but was brought up in Pakistan which is why I can speak these languages.
“On my first day of working in the Cranbourne centre one of the clients who spoke Dari commented how much easier it is to be able to communicate one to one in his own language,” she said.
“It was apparent how happy the client and his family were when they left from the appointment.”
Violet Zhang, an audiologist at the Glen Waverley centre, speaks English, Mandarin Chinese and Shanghainese.
“My parents were immigrants in the 1980’s and I know how difficult language barriers can be to accessing services.
“I often think that in some ways, having English as a second language has many similarities to having hearing loss. You miss out on the ends and beginnings of sentences, if people are talking too quickly,
or have a strong accent, you might find it difficult to join in on group conversations and find it more difficult in background noise,” she said.
Violet says she has a Shanghainese client who is ‘delighted’ by the new store, and by seeing a health professional who can discuss her concerns in her first language.
“I love it when I’m able to educate and provide information in a way that the client finds easy to understand.”
