ABSTRACT
Purpose:
use the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health-Children and Youth (ICF-CY) at National Health System services to record the hearing and language development of children in their first year of life.
Methods:
the community health agents (CHAs) of the Basic Health Unit in the city of Sorocaba, São Paulo, Brazil, were trained to apply a questionnaire to monitor the hearing and language in children in their first year of life assisted by the Family Health Strategy (FHS). Audiologists made the correlation of each of the questions with the codes of the ICF-CY.
Results:
thirteen CHAs participated in the training program and had higher percentage hits on post-training evaluation, regarding pre-training. Twenty-two children were followed up, of whom 17 evolved as expected, 2 showed improvement in the results, 2 required continuity in their monitoring and for 1, the suspected development risk was maintained.
Conclusions:
the use of the ICF-CY allowed the expansion of the attention of health professionals and it can be used to monitor child development. The creation / adaptation of standardized assessment tools based on ICF favors its use in the clinical practice. The training of CHAs was effective and led to their involvement with the issues relevant to child development.
Keywords:
Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences; Audiology; Language Development; Community Health Workers; International Classification of Functioning; Disability and Health