Abstract
Introduction:
Hearing aids often appear broken and whether due to the battery or earwax simple fixes can allow patients to hear. This project aimed to improve hearing impaired patients' experience and healthcare by providing support for hearing aids across Elderly Medicine wards in a large teaching hospital in Leeds.
Method:
A survey evaluated the proportion of patients with non-functional hearing aids, with qualitative questions to evaluate the impact. The first intervention was a toolkit showing how to check if a hearing aid worked, how to fix common issues, to go alongside spare batteries with a QR code link for further information. As a second intervention, teaching sessions were arranged for ward staff to improve knowledge and encourage staff to fix issues.
Results:
101, 100 and 102 inpatients were surveyed for the baseline data collection, 1st reaudit and 2nd reaudit respectively. 1 in 4 patients had hearing aids with them and the primary outcome measure of ‘Are both hearing aids working’ improved from 56% to 70% to 87% after each intervention. The most common issue found was a flat battery and the prevalence reduced from 5 to 2 to 1.
When asked what difference a working hearing aid makes: “It makes all the difference, I wouldn’t manage, I don’t want to miss anything”, with one relative stating “I think it’s hugely important, people may just think she’s confused if she can’t hear what you’re saying, when she’s as sharp as a tack in there.”
Conclusion:
There was a clear improvement in the proportion of working hearing aids after each intervention and feedback from patients reinforced how impactful having a working hearing aid is. This has shown that providing hearing aid support is a practical and meaningful way of improving patient care that can be easily implemented elsewhere.
Comments
Your intervention
Simple but effective and worthwhile.
A worthwhile project
Would love to see this rolled out widely. Congratulations.
Good project
What additional steps would be considered to reduce the loss of hearing aids when patients are transferred between the ED and Inpatient wards?
Reply
Thanks for the comment, that's a really challenging question. An easy way would be to include a question in a transfer checklist that's specific for hearing aids, however I'm rather sceptical that this would resolve the issue (and I think it might already be there). Getting someone to label hearing aids, again I doubt would solve the issue, but it's an option. Having fewer transfers would also be great but unlikely. Regardless, I do have hope as some newer hearing aids have locator/tracking features.
It's certainly an area that could be explored more.
Important Work
I work with people who have hearing loss and I know how important this issue is to them. They would also benefit from communication tactics (e.g., facing them when speaking, writing down key information, reducing background noise like radios when communicating), especially for those who don't wear hearing aids.
Practical and Transferable
This is an excellent project that many conference attendees could consider implementing in their own Trusts/wards - making it a simple idea that has to potential to influence so many. Many of us should be taking this away and ensuring our teams have something similar in place.