Priority setting partnership in childhood deafness and hearing loss (2024 to 2025)

This project will help us understand what the priorities for childhood deafness and hearing loss research should be.

At the end of the project, we’ll draft a ‘Top 10’ list of the most important questions researchers should be trying to answer about childhood deafness and hearing loss. 

This list will help organisations focus their health funding and research on topics that make the biggest difference.

The final top 10 research questions will be published later this year. We’ll share the list here when it’s ready. 

The project is a collaboration between the National Deaf Children’s Society, the University of Manchester, Aston University and Lancaster University, with additional funding from PF Charitable Trust. 

The team will follow the James Lind Alliance’s well-established process to find out what the research priorities are for people with direct experience of childhood deafness and hearing loss.

The James Lind Alliance priority setting process has 6 stages to it:

1. Identifying a range of stakeholders, including patients, carers and clinicians.
2. Collecting initial priority questions via a survey.
3. Refining questions by collating them and checking them against research evidence to identify ‘true’ uncertainties.
4. Inviting stakeholders to prioritise the refined questions using a second survey.
5. Gathering patients, carers and clinicians in a final workshop to prioritise, by consensus, the top 10 unanswered research questions.
6. The top 10 research priorities will be disseminated widely to patients, carers, clinicians, researchers, policymakers, patient organisations and research funders.

Find out more about this process on the James Lind Alliance website. 

Meet the team