National and regional programmes

Few of the low and middle income countries have national plans or programmes for prevention of hearing loss. WHO believes that strong national plans need to be aligned with its own programmes and policies in order to achieve people-centred care delivered through strong integrated health systems. It has followed up this ideal with the setting of indicators and targets to measure the number of Member States that are implementing comprehensive national plans on this subject together with relevant strategies recommended by the World Health Organisation (WHO).The following three mega-countries have already taken the lead and developed plans to prevent hearing loss and commenced to implement them. All of them are different according to differing national needs, but all of them are attempting to reduce the burden of hearing loss in the most effective way possible. How they are doing this is set out in the following pages.© 2012 Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.