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 re-audit 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.
Cobb et al. (Sun,) studied this question.