Evaluating the Impact of Vocal Health Education on Mask-wearing Workers During COVID-19

University of Cincinnati

Status: Completed

Conditions: Health Behavior

Treatments: Behavioral: Educational Vocal Health Modules

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT04858542

2020-0889

Details and patient eligibility

About

The purpose of this clinical trial is to understand how viewing educational health modules impacts vocal health behaviors in mask-wearing healthcare workers.

Full description

Results of the investigators' previous work showed that mask-wearing healthcare workers have difficulty with voice and communication. Healthcare workers reported significant increases in vocal effort and dyspnea while wearing masks, and showed greater effort and poorer vocal quality at the end of the workday compared to the beginning of the day. Despite these negative changes, very few healthcare workers reported using any type of communication strategy (e.g., taking breaks, using gestures). Therefore, the investigators developed educational modules to address the voice and communication problems facing this population. This clinical trial plans to evaluate how these educational modules impact subjective/objective voice and communication measures in mask-wearing healthcare workers.

Enrollment: 5 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18+ years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• English Speaker
• Occupational voice user who is required to wear a mask at work

Exclusion criteria

• History of neurological disorder or disease
• History of head/neck cancer
• Current speech, language, voice, or hearing problem/disorder
• Currently sick or have been sick within the last 14 days, or is waiting on a COVID-19 test result

Trial design

Primary purpose: Prevention

Allocation: N/A

Interventional model: Single Group Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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5 participants in 1 patient group

Mask-wearing healthcare workers

Experimental group

Description:

All participants in this arm will view the educational health modules and their subjective/objective outcomes will be measure pre/post module viewing.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Educational Vocal Health Modules