GET INVOLVED
Get involved How do you know how good your local audiology service is? The Government has refused to make sure all audiology services are independently inspected. So, we surveyed them ourselves to find out more. WE’VE BEEN ASKING THE QUESTION ‘How do you know how good your local audiology service is?’ since we launched our Listen Up! campaign in 2014. The last time all audiology services in England were routinely inspected was in 2012, when NHS reports showed that one-third were failing to meet basic standards in audiology. Shortly after this, compulsory inspections of children’s hearing services were scrapped and replaced with a government approved scheme. Services can choose to become ‘accredited’ under this scheme, to prove that they offer a good service, but they don’t have to. Only information about those who are accredited is made public. There’s no information about services that have tried but didn’t meet the standards for accreditation or those that don’t take part in the scheme at all. As the Government won’t enforce compulsory independent inspections we decided to survey children’s audiology services ourselves to find out more.
We found that: ●● two children’s audiology services were judged by independent assessors as not yet meeting all the standards required to become an accredited service ●● more than a third of audiology services hadn’t even signed up to join the scheme. They were most likely to say that they hadn’t joined because they didn’t have enough staff to prepare for an inspection or they couldn’t afford it ●● only 15% of children’s audiology services in England are accredited ●● accredited services were less likely to be experiencing reductions in staff, or problems with long waiting times for appointments ●● accredited services were also more likely to have a training programme for their audiologists to update their skills and knowledge. This shows why inspections of children’s audiology services are crucial to boosting quality. We want the quality of all children’s audiology services to be independently assessed and for information from these assessments to be made available to deaf children and their families.
www.ndcs.org.uk/livechat | Freephone Helpline 0808 800 8880 (voice and text)
You can help us make this happen by emailing your local clinical commissioning group (CCG) and NHS England. CCGs are NHS bodies responsible for planning and commissioning healthcare services for their local area.
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NHS reports
showed that one-third were failing to meet basic standards in audiology.
The Government provides guidelines on what CCGs should consider when commissioning healthcare services and it recommends they should use services that are accredited.
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Go to www.ndcs.org.uk/ listenup to: •v isit our map to see what your local audiology service told us in our survey •e mail your CCG and NHS England leads •d ownload the full report on our survey findings The Health of Children’s Hearing Services in England.
National Deaf Children’s Society Families | Summer 2017
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