Hi there,

Thank you for starting this thread. 

We are sorry none of our members were able to respond to your thread before your appointment. Your Community is quite new and sometimes it takes a few days to get a response. We do hope that the appointment went well.

We have information on our website about Hearing Aids. This includes a section on your child's hearing aids-frequently asked questions.

You can also download our free booklet Hearing aids information for families from our documents section of our website here.

And of course if you still have questions please don’t hesitate to contact us on the Helpline.

Best Wishes,

Denise

Your Community moderation team  

Wow! it's taken 8 years for ENT to reccomend audiology! 

An audiolgoy review can take an hour but it's hard to know if it will be all one appoint or a few subsequent ones. 

The audiolgoist will chat to you (annoyingly still with mask on) and then will do a hearing test if haven't one recently. Hard to know exactly but often then do soundfield testing which is general for both ears or with ear phones which tests each specific ear. To get more information they will likely also put a headband to do a bone conduction test. By comparing the two the audioglogist can see if it's a conductive hearing loss (middle ear problem) or sensori neural loss (nerve problem) or a combination of both. Another test can be done also to check if the ear drums are moving (glue ear?). And sometimes the audiolgist will also do a speech discrmintaion test... he will have little toys laid out e.g. key and tree and test point to the tree at different decibles to check the correct discrimination even from similar sounding words without lip reading. 

After some or all of these tests the audiologist will discuss it all with you. 

Then comes the fun part. Choosing a hearing aid. NHS have very good ones but you don't get to choose which kind; that's the audiologist job to decide based on the hearing levels how powerful the aid needs to be. But you do get to choose the colour! Also if not done yet then ear impressions need to be made so that the ear moulds can get made to fit. Here too you get to choose colours, glitters, picture etc. The ear moulds get replaced every few months which keeps the excitement going.

If the moulds have already been made the audiolgosit may take ear measurments (requires sitting very still) and then will program the hearing aids according to the test results. That can take ten to fifteen min on the computer...  Before this point you will want to discuss the hearing aid capabilities and ensure programed accordingly. There are settings you need e.g. to use the loop for listining to music. Or to connect to the radio aid. Discuss all this with audiologist so that he can turn on any settings that you will probably need. If you do think you will be using a radio aid (you can try out from the loan program from NDCS) then also aks him to put 'shoes' on the hearing aid to save you a trip to the hospital just for that. Also remember to get plenty of batteries wich are free.

It's a lot to get used to the at begining but likely you'll stick to the same audiolgoist for each app. How often depends on the type of hearing loss could be very 6 weeks or or 3 months, or yearly...

But once you get home if they are ANY issues at all you can call up and make another appointment. It's true that with Covid it's slow going but for children still usually get seen pretty quickly.

Goool luck hope your appointment goes well.