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Be a fan of transformation. Special Olympics changes lives
by Karl Hejlik
When Special Olympics first contacted Dr. Melina Willems from the University College of Artevelde in Belgium about volunteer opportunities at a Healthy Athletes® event, she assumed the organization wanted her to send her students. As an instructor and practitioner in audiology, she knew that providing hearing tests to athletes with intellectual disabilities at the event would provide invaluable, real-world experience for the young doctors in training. What she didn't know at the time was that her phone would ring again a few weeks before the event and impact both her immediate plans and her future.
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Shirley Loosveldt, an audiology student at the University College of Artevelde in Belgium, performs a screening for Healthy Hearing during the 2007 Special Olympics World Summer Games in Shanghai, China. She has been a volunteer for Healthy Athletes three times and plans to continue volunteering at future events. (Photo: courtesy of Dr. Melina Willems) |
“Special Olympics called and said I should go too. I was surprised,” she said. “But in the end, I was happy to go. It opened a lot of things for me. It showed me a lot of things.”
One thing it showed Willems was how to best interact with patients with intellectual disabilities. “Before, I didn't adapt the way I tested. It is thanks to Special Olympics that I am using special techniques that are more appropriate to children and to children with intellectual disabilities.”
Willems received that life-changing phone call in 2000. Today, she regularly volunteers for Healthy Athletes events, brings her students to assist, and convinced her husband, a pediatrician, to be involved as well.
The Healthy Athletes initiative provides free health-care screenings to Special Olympics athletes at competitions, but its goal extends beyond Special Olympics athletes. Through influence in their fields, health-care professionals who volunteer are helping bring better health-care access to all people with intellectual disabilities.
One of the ways volunteers are accomplishing this is through educating the next generation of health-care providers. Willems' current students are taking two courses that were not offered in the past. First-year audiology students complete a screening class that incorporates the Healthy Athletes screening, and third-year students take a course on treating patients with special needs. “We didn't have these courses before. It came about because of my involvement with Special Olympics,” Willems said.
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Dr. Melina Willems from the University College of Artevelde in Belgium poses with two Special Olympics athletes during the Healthy Athletes screenings at the 2004 National Games in Ghent, Belgium. (Photo: courtesy of Dr. Melina Willems) |
In addition to teaching students, Healthy Athletes volunteers also strive to increase the knowledge of their colleagues. Prof. Katrin Neumann is Director of the Department for Phoniatry and Pediatric Audiology at Goethe-University of Frankfurt in Germany. Like many volunteers, she had “virtually no knowledge” of the unique health challenges of people with intellectual disabilities when she first volunteered in 2003. Since then, however, she has begun seeing young patients with intellectual disabilities in the university clinic, conducted related research and published work about intellectual disabilities in peer-reviewed journals.
“I was surprised by the outcome of our studies,” Neumann said. “There are many more opportunities to treatment than I thought. I have given several presentations in my field to make others aware of the problem. They were all as surprised as I used to be. Even in the specialties, the level of knowledge was not very high.”
Dr. Neumann is also working with the World Health Organization as an expert in pediatric audiology, and working on guidelines that call for regular screenings for all people with intellectual disabilities.
Like thousands of other volunteers for Healthy Athletes, Neumann has experienced dramatic change since being involved. “It changed my attitude towards the whole organization. I see Special Olympics as a unique chance to improve the general health state of people with intellectual disabilities everywhere.”
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