Untreated hearing loss is recognized as a growing global health priority because of its prevalence and harmful effects on health and well-being. Until recently, little progress had been made in expanding hearing care beyond traditional clinic-based models to incorporate public health approaches that increase accessibility to and affordability of hearing care. As demonstrated in numerous countries and for many health conditions, sharing health-care tasks with community health workers (CHWs) offers advantages as a complementary approach to expand health-service delivery and improve public health. This paper explores the possibilities of task shifting to provide hearing care across the life course by reviewing several ongoing projects in a variety of settings – Bangladesh, India, South Africa and the United States of America. The selected programmes train CHWs to provide a range of hearing-care services, from childhood hearing screening to management of age-related hearing loss. We discuss lessons learnt from these examples to inform best practices for task shifting within community-delivered hearing care. Preliminary evidence supports the feasibility, acceptability and effectiveness of hearing care delivered by CHWs in these varied settings. To make further progress, community-delivered hearing care must build on established models of CHWs and ensure adequate training and supervision, delineation of the scope of practice, supportive local and national legislation, incorporation of appropriate technology and analysis of programme costs and cost–effectiveness. In view of the growing evidence, community-delivered hearing care may now be a way forward to improve hearing health equity.

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New optical Hubble Space Telescope (HST), Spitzer Space Telescope, Galaxy Evolution Explorer, and Chandra observations of the single-nucleus, luminous infrared galaxy (LIRG) merger IC 883 are presented. The galaxy is a member of the Great Observatories All-sky LIRG Survey and is of particular interest for a detailed examination of a luminous late-stage merger due to the richness of the optically visible star clusters and the extended nature of the nuclear X-ray, mid-IR, CO, and radio emission. In the HST Advanced Camera for Surveys images, the galaxy is shown to contain 156 optically visible star clusters distributed throughout the nuclear regions and tidal tails of the merger, with a majority of visible clusters residing in an arc ∼3-7 kpc from the position of the mid-infrared core of the galaxy. The luminosity functions of the clusters have an α F435W ∼ −2.17 ± 0.22 and α F814W ∼ −2.01 ± 0.21, compared with V-band-derived values measured for the well-studied LIRG NGC 34 and the Antennae Galaxy of α ∼ −1.7 ± 0.1 and −2.13 ± 0.07, respectively. Further, the colors and absolute magnitudes of the majority of the clusters are consistent with instantaneous burst population synthesis model ages in the range of a few ×10 7 -10 8 yr (for 10 5 M clusters), but may be as low as few ×10 6 yr with extinction factored in. The X-ray and mid-IR spectroscopies are indicative of predominantly starburst-produced nuclear emission, and the star formation rate, estimated based on the assumption that the radio and far-infrared luminosities are tracing the starburst population, is ∼80 M yr −1 . The kinematics of the CO emission and the morphology of both the CO and radio emission are consistent with the nuclear starburst being situated in a highly inclined disk 2 kpc in diameter with an infrared surface brightness μ IR ∼ 2 × 10 11 L kpc −2 , a factor of 10 less than that of the Orion star-forming region.

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