Meet Tara Collins

After 8 years working as an audiologist at the Saskatoon Hearing Aid Plan from 2009 until its closure in 2017, Tara Collins has gained extensive experience working with a broad range of people of diverse backgrounds, hearing abilities and ages. With her science and research background, she values and depends on peer-reviewed, best practice audiological methods and the latest technology for diagnosis of hearing loss and appropriate treatment and follow up. Tara helps her clients understand the degree and configuration of their hearing loss and how it relates to the challenges they may face. She informs them of the implications of increased listening effort, communication breakdowns, activity limitations and the long-term negative effects on cognition and mental health. With this understanding she helps her clients choose the most appropriate hearing devices for their hearing loss, lifestyle and abilities. Tara works with her clients to successfully use their devices and improve their communication abilities to keep them engaged in their social and professional activities. At all follow-up appointments she continues to reinforce the importance of consistent use of hearing devices and regular care and maintenance. She encourages family members and support persons to use effective communication strategies to improve her clients’ listening skills and speech understanding.

As an audiologist, Tara has found that her clients appreciate the extra time taken to educate and inform them about hearing loss in general and their own unique hearing loss in particular. Many are comforted knowing Tara herself is an experienced hearing device user, as she has become intimately knowledgeable about the many of the benefits and limitations of hearing devices and accessories.  Not only does she encourage the use of wireless hearing accessories but she also demonstrates and works with clients to ensure that they will be able to use the devices successfully. Because of her education, experience and analytic nature, Tara is also skilled at finding solutions to clients’ problems and troubleshooting malfunctions in devices.  She also recognises when it is necessary to depend on the expertise of manufacturer technical and audiology support.

Tara pursued the field of audiology following her own extremely positive, life-changing experience obtaining hearing aids while she was at UBC.  After struggling for many years with gradually progressive, genetic hearing loss and its increasingly negative effects on her social relationships, job performance and educational endeavours, she sought help from an audiologist. She can recall her first day with her new hearing aids vividly, as she finally understood how much she was missing just as her family and friends had been complaining of for years. She was astounded at how much she could hear when wearing her hearing aids, with significantly less effort. After successfully completing her Bachelor of Science degree at UBC, Tara worked in Toronto at the Ontario Cancer Institute as a research laboratory technician. While there, Tara realised that her primary resistance to hearing aids – that they would make her disability more visible – was unfounded, as her untreated hearing loss was far more noticeable to others than her hearing aids ever were.

Now, as an audiologist, Tara strives to increase awareness of the negative effects of untreated hearing loss, and to encourage greater acceptance of hearing devices in society by keeping hers very visible to others. She is known to wear bright and sparkly earmolds, and she adds decorations to her hearing aids to bring even more attention to them. Tara wants to show that they are not only necessary medical devices that improve her life, but they can also express her personality!