Case Study
New employment of a kitchen assistant at a retirement home

This is a retirement home. The meals for the residents are prepared in a kitchen that is to be expanded and modernized for this purpose.

The woman has a hearing impairment and is therefore only able to perceive acoustic information, e.g. spoken language and signals, to a limited extent. Due to her disability, audible information must therefore be amplified so that the woman can hear it again. The degree of disability (GdB) is 50.

The woman was newly employed by the retirement home as a kitchen assistant.

The employee is expected to carry out simple kitchen tasks, from preparing food to filling thermal containers into the serving trolley, to cleaning up the kitchen, cooking utensils and crockery. The woman can only be hired because the retirement home is planning to expand capacity and modernize the kitchen. The additional equipment required for the kitchen includes three food serving trolleys, a combination cell for the refrigerated storage of food, a 40 and 60-litre pressure cooker, a combi-steamer, a soup pot, a roasting pan and an extractor hood.
The kitchen assistant communicates with the help of digital hearing aids, which can be adjusted as standard via programs and thus also enable the attenuation of background noise and amplification of speech to a certain extent for better perception in everyday life.

The purchase of assistive products for the kitchen assistant's newly created workplace was funded by the Integration and Inclusion Office. The retirement home also received a two-year integration grant as a wage subsidy from the employment agency, as the woman is severely disabled, was unemployed and the training required more than the usual amount. The costs for the hearing aids had already been covered by the statutory health insurance fund to compensate for the disability. The consultation, measurements and adaptations of the hearing aids were carried out by a specialist hearing aid acoustics store.