Dana Mulvany
picture Dana Mulvany, MSW, LCSW, is a licensed clinical social worker, writer and consultant in disability issues. She works as a counselor and clinical supervisor at the St. Joseph's Center for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Union City, California, and has a private practice and consultation business in the Silicon Valley area. Dana has been a member of SHHH since 1984 and attended all the national and state SHHH conventions since 1986. She created the first SHHH web page for SHHH-California (at http://www.shhhca.org) and helped found and name Beyond-Hearing, to which she contributes frequently.

Dana is also the hard of hearing representative on the Equipment Program Advisory Committee for the California Deaf and Disabled Telecommunications Program (http://www.ddtp.org). Formerly she was a member of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Advisory Committee (DHHAC) for the California Department of Rehabilitation. She received twelve days of training on the Americans with Disabilities Act from the Disability Rights and Education Defense Fund (http://www.dredf.org) and participated in an SHHH Leadership Conference.

Dana served on the national board of trustees for SHHH from 1994 to 1997. She held various positions on the state level in California, including Vice President, Northern California Chapter Coordinator, and Special Projects Coordinator. Presently she maintains the web site for SHHH-California and email alerts lists for Californians and Bay Area residents with hearing loss.

Dana enjoys learning about technological innovations and towards this end has created another email alert list to inform people with hearing loss of new products and services. For more information, please visit her web site, listed below.

Single, Dana shares her residence with Cloudy, a gorgeous silverpoint Persian with green eyes adopted from the Humane Society. She enjoys playing volleyball and surfing the Internet.

Hearing Loss

Dana was diagnosed with a bilateral hearing loss at approximately two and a half years of age but may have been born with the hearing loss. Her ski-slope hearing loss in her better ear ranges from moderate (35 db at 250 cps) to profound (110+ at 2000) but she is able to use the telephone by voice with her hearing aid. She has zero speech discrimination in her left ear, which is not aided.

The hearing loss appears to be fairly stable. The cause of the hearing loss is not known.

Overcoming Hearing Loss

Dana uses a AVR ImpaCt hearing aid and a variety of assistive listening devices. Her residence is wired with an audio loop system, which is connected to her TV, door bell, fire alarm, telephone and computer. She is able to use the telecoil of her hearing aid to hear sound from the audio loop system from anywhere in the residence. She uses captioning in conjunction with the audio loop system to enjoy TV programming and videos. She also uses amplification on the phone.

Outside the home, Dana often uses the SoundWizard with a neck loop and its directional microphone in noisy situations such as parties or restaurants, or an FM or infrared system along with lipreading to understand lectures. She attends open-captioned movies, bypassing other movies without captions or subtitles. She also uses a Nokia 6162 cell phone with a vibrating battery and short messaging service (SMS).

Contact Information


BHBio form submission received 18 Oct 1999 23:59:11