Behind the Scenes at the Pennsylvania Ear Institute

In this podcast, we talk to Lindsay Bondurant, PhD, CCC-A, director of the Pennsylvania Ear Institute (PEI) about everything her role as director entails and what she loves about PEI and Salus University.

What does a typical day in your life or week look like as director of PEI?

Dr. Bondurant: My work responsibilities look very different from day to day, which is one of the things that I enjoy about my role at Salus. It does make it a little bit hectic sometimes. For example, Mondays and Tuesdays are usually devoted to administrative responsibilities. As clinical director, I meet with our office manager every week to talk about different issues that are coming up in the clinic. Many of our conversations involve billing and reimbursement, scheduling, and how things are going for the providers and the staff, so we can make sure we are meeting everybody’s needs at PEI and make sure nothing is falling through the cracks. 

Sometimes I need to be flexible with my administrative time. For example, last Monday I squeezed in an appointment for a young child who wasn't able to come in on one of my regular clinic days. I was able to meet with that patient and her family to make sure that she had her hearing aids when she needed them. Later that Monday afternoon, I was giving  tours of the clinic to some visitors from Drexel University who wanted to get to know the campus better, and then I had a chance to have some social time with some of my future colleagues from Drexel.

Tuesdays are similar for me-- being an administrator at a university involves a lot of meetings because we need to try to connect with all of the different people who are impacted by what we do. I often need to schedule meetings with the people who supervise students in the clinic, or the people who oversee billing and reimbursement. On Wednesdays and Thursdays, I get to work with my patients and families, which I love. Friday entails different responsibilities for teaching, committee work, and meeting with prospective students who are going to be hopefully coming to Salus, as well as interviewing prospective faculty members. That's a quick overview and what my entire week might look like on any given week.

What brought you to Salus?

A: It’s a bit of a circuitous story. I started my career as a pediatric audiologist focusing primarily on patient care, and worked my way up to an administrative position at one of the hospitals in Philadelphia. Then I decided I wanted to get a doctoral degree so that I could teach and do research. I wanted to have more of a role in educating future audiologists and in particular future pediatric audiologists, to have the chance to teach them to provide the best services possible for their patients and families. I left Philadelphia to get my PhD, and then worked at another university for a few years. Ultimately I was looking for a change in pace. Traditional faculty life is lots of research, publishing, and teaching, but I missed patient care. I was approached by a current Salus faculty member after I gave a talk at a conference, and she mentioned to me that this position was open as a clinic director. It wasn't something that I had been considering, but once I learned more about it, the job description really spoke to my strengths and my interests.

As clinic director at Salus, I would have an opportunity to do active patient care, which I missed doing when I had more of a traditional faculty role. I was very excited about working with kids and their families again, but I would also get to supervise and work with graduate students, which is important to me. A big component of what I do as clinic director is to plan for the future of the clinic. As we built the clinic’s patient base, we started to think about next steps and the different directions we could go. That was exciting to me to put that “innovative thinking” into projects to increase the reach of the clinic.

Those were the reasons that the position at Salus interested me but also, I had worked in Philadelphia for several years when I first started my career and I just fell in love with this area. As a southerner, I did not expect to, but it is my favorite place that I've ever lived. The opportunity to move back to this area and put down some roots, after years of moving around, was really appealing to me.

What do you like about Salus? What has made you stay here?

A: There are a lot of things that I like about Salus and a lot of reasons that I stay. I have moved around a lot in my life and I've had a number of different jobs over the course of my career. Salus is the place that I've stayed at longer than any other place I've been, and I think a large part of that is that the people at Salus are fantastic. I enjoy working with my colleagues in PEI and in the Osborne College of Audiology (OCA); they are kind people that I enjoy talking to. Salus is small enough that I've had the opportunity to get to know people in lots of different departments. I truly enjoy coming to work and getting to see the other people in the clinic, the college and across the university. That has been the biggest game changer for me, knowing that every day I look forward to coming to work and seeing my colleagues.

How did you choose your pediatric audiology specialty?

A: I always knew, even from the time I was an undergraduate student, that I was interested in working with children. I enjoy their energy, and I've always found pediatrics to be fun, and I have a knack for working with kids. It has been so rewarding to have the opportunity to connect with children and their families during their journey with hearing loss, and see them grow over time.

One thing I tell my students is when you're in pediatrics, your patients change so much from one visit to the next. If you are working with adults, your patients will have a very similar personality and lifestyle from one year to the next. But when I have a patient who's a newborn, they have very different needs, abilities and personalities, compared to when I see that same patient as a two-year-old or a five-year-old. It keeps it interesting and it's really fun to see how the kids change over time. I think that's one thing that I find rewarding. Pediatrics is intellectually stimulating as well, since there are so many different adaptations that need to be done for patients of different ages and ability levels.

Being able to get a two-year-old to do an entire hearing test requires a whole different set of skills, ideas and flexibility that aren’t necessarily needed when testing compliant adult patients. For me, variety keeps it interesting and intellectually stimulating. In addition to that, it is rewarding knowing that what we are contributing will impact them for their entire life. We are helping them build that foundation when they’re very young, to prepare them for when they are teenagers and young adults going all the way into adulthood. What we build in their early childhood is what's going to set the stage for their success later in life. That is a huge, but rewarding, responsibility.

What's the most rewarding thing about your job? 

A: The clinical pediatric side is rewarding in emotionally connecting with kids and their families. I also have the opportunity to mentor graduate students, and it’s rewarding to see them progress from their admissions interview, to finishing the program, and all the milestones in between. They start off knowing very little about audiology, and we get to see them grow and talk to them about what specialties they might be interested in. It is a joy to  see them graduate and turn into full-fledged audiologists. I have graduate students from years ago who have become colleagues and who are becoming well-respected audiologists in the field.

It’s fun to look at them and think, “I knew you when you were just getting started as a student, and now you're setting the world on fire and doing these amazing things.” So again, that's part of why clinicians are drawn to working in our environment at PEI because we get that combination of patient care and also connecting with students, mentoring them, and seeing them off into the world. This allows us to have a bigger impact on the profession of audiology and future patients. There are only so many patients that I can see over the course of my career, but if I can train a lot of good audiologists, then my potential impact is exponentially increased. Those audiologists will be great providers and caregivers and do the best that they can for their patients. And I got to play a role in that too. So it's pretty amazing.

Is there anything about your job that most people wouldn't know?

A: I find that there are a lot of things that people don't realize about audiology in general. All of the work, training and experience that goes into being able to serve a patient to the best of our ability and work towards these optimal outcomes for our patients. Audiologists need to have expertise not just in the auditory system, which is a very complex system, but we also need to understand how the brain works, how acoustics work and how sound is transmitted in different environments. Then we need to also understand the sophisticated electronics that go into hearing aids and how all of those things interact with each other. There’s a lot of depth to the field. The average person thinks either you can hear or you can’t hear, and if you can’t hear then we put a device on you that makes things louder. The reality is there's a lot more complexity to it than that, and it takes somebody with a lot of training to be able to manage all of the aspects of providing high-quality patient care, who will help the patients navigate that journey from not being able to hear well, to being able to connect with the people that they love and do the things that they want to do.

For more information about the Pennsylvania Ear Institute, visit salusuhealth.com/pei.