28 March 2024

NCHA member update – 28 March

This month:

• MP calls for primary care audiology  
• Hospitals struggling to cope with hearing problems 
• Two-year waits for hearing aids in NHS Grampian 
• HCPC webinars and registration 
• Tinnitus and hearing aids 
• Other sector news 
• Health policy news 

MP calls for primary care audiology

Yasmin Qureshi MP is calling for audiology to become the 5th NHS primary care service to meet the demand for unmet hearing needs.

The Labour MP for Bolton South East says it is time to acknowledge that hospitals and GPs alone cannot provide the volume of hearing care needed for an ageing population.

She said: "Just as NHS patients can access treatment for vision impairment and sight loss through their high street opticians, making audiology a primary care service would enable people to access NHS hearing care the same way."

Qureshi is one of millions of working-age people with hearing loss. She admits that she sometimes struggles to hear in Parliament. Writing in The House, she outlines the impact of untreated hearing loss on working lives. She describes the links between hearing impairment and social isolation, poor mental health and dementia risk.

In primary care audiology, the NCHA sets out the case for fixing structural issues in ear and hearing care to meet the population's audiological needs in a sustainable way.

Hospitals struggling to cope with hearing problems

ENT UK is again shining a spotlight on growing ENT waiting lists, including referrals that could be better managed outside the hospital setting.

It describes primary-care ENT referrals, "especially uncomplicated and mostly non-surgical problems such as ear wax, simple ear infections, hearing loss, tinnitus and nasal allergy", as the greatest challenge to waiting lists, saying that about 50 per cent of referrals fall into this category.

Getting It Right First Time (GIRFT), an NHS England collaboration designed to review and improve patient care has previously published a report which recommended that primary and community provision be expanded for audiology-led care, allowing ENT to focus on more complex cases.

ENT UK estimates that the NHS would have to double the number of clinics and operating lists each week to return to 2019 waiting-list numbers.

The Health Service Journal has published an interactive map of RTT waiting time data for England. You can select ENT as a speciality and click on each location for a detailed breakdown.

In primary care audiology, the NCHA sets out the clinical and economic evidence to support better integration with ENT.

Two-year waits for hearing aids in NHS Grampian

NHS Grampian has revealed that some people are waiting for two years to be fitted with hearing aids in Aberdeen and the surrounding areas.

Liam Kerr, Conservative MSP for North East Scotland, wrote to NHS Grampian saying his constituents felt let down by the system.

Dr Adam Coldwells, the health board's interim chief executive, apologised for the long waits, attributing them to underfunding and chronic staff shortages. He said each audiologist is responsible for about 8,000 more patients than in other areas of Scotland.

Read more.

Tinnitus and hearing aids

Tinnitus UK and National Institute for Hearing Research are looking for participants to help design research into the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of hearing aids for people with tinnitus.

You can signpost eligible service users to [email protected] if they have:

• been recently diagnosed with tinnitus
• not yet had an initial appointment with an audiologist, ENT or hearing therapist
• no perceptible hearing loss
• access to a computer with video call capability (Teams or Zoom)
• up to two hours free for an online focus group.

The charity also marked Tinnitus Week earlier this month with a report called The Struggle for Silence. It reveals the scale of tinnitus and its impact on mental health.

HCPC webinars and registration

The Hearing Care Professions Council (HCPC) is hosting a series of webinars on the revisions to standards of conduct, performance and ethics and social media guidance. 

They include the following subjects:

• Introducing the revised standards and exploring your scope of practice
• Getting it right when things go wrong
• 'Send to all!' Challenges and opportunities of social media.

The standards' revisions start on 1 September 2024.

Members are also reminded that hearing aid dispensers should renew their registration by 1 May 2024. Read the HCPC renewal dates and online registration instructions. 

Other sector news

• ENHANCE, a prospective longitudinal study based in Melbourne, Australia, indicates that using hearing aids may help delay cognitive decline and dementia in older adults with hearing loss.
• A new report, Getting the numbers right on hearing loss, pulls together data on the prevalence of hearing loss and hearing-aid use across Europe.
• BSA publishes new recommended procedures for tympanometry and acoustic reflex thresholds.
• NHS England has included earwax among conditions covered in new guidance advising GPs and pharmacist prescribers not to routinely prescribe certain over-the-counter preparations, including for earwax.
• Award-winning Deaf swimmer campaigns against 'discriminatory' policies that deny him funding. Read more.

Health policy news

Streeting backs greater role for ISPs in short term
Wes Streeting, shadow health secretary, says independent sector provider (ISP) capacity should be used to help the NHS. In an interview with the Financial Times, he recommended that ISPs be used in the short term to shore up the NHS in the long term.

Streeting warned earlier that the NHS risked going the way of Woolworths if it failed to modernise. Speaking at a Wired Health event, he said that Labour would challenge those who continue to promote the status quo, and go further than the Conservatives by making GPs share data so people can benefit from more joined-up, evidence-based care.

Budget digest
Healthcare experts were lukewarm over the Spring Budget, saying there remain serious challenges to overcome workforce shortages and waiting list backlogs.

The chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, has announced an additional £6 billion for the NHS and £3.4 billion for capital investment in productivity with a focus on digital transformation, leaving an additional £2.5 billion for daily running costs, including support for reducing waiting times.

The Budget increase followed an Institute for Fiscal Studies warning that the NHS was facing its biggest real-terms cut since the 1970s.

The Health Foundation's REAL Centre published analysis showing the value of government health spending, which described the NHS budget as "essentially flat in real terms compared with the previous year". The Department of Health and Social Care's total budget will increase to £192bn in 2024-2025, equating to a 0.6% real terms increase versus the previous years and a 1% decrease when adjusted for a growing and ageing population, it reported.

Meanwhile, an extensive report from the BMJ Commission on NHS Funding for a Secure Future, stated that the health service needed an immediate cash injection of around £8.5 billion a year for the next four years to deal with the £32bn shortfall in daily operations funding.
 
Dr Jennifer Dixon, chief executive of the Health Foundation, said: "An additional £2.5bn on day-to-day spending for the NHS in 2024/25 is welcome, but no one should be under any illusion that this will significantly reduce the long waiting times currently being experienced by patients."

The King's Fund remarked on a sea change in public support for political action on public health, reflecting cross-party agreement on the need for digital transformation.

Public satisfaction with NHS reaches new low
A quarter of people are satisfied with NHS provision, citing frustration with waiting times and lack of staff, according to the long-running British Social Attitudes Survey. 

Only 24% of respondents said they were satisfied with their NHS care, 5 percentage points lower than the 2022 figures, and a significant change from 2010, when 70% of people said they were satisfied.

The National Centre for Social Research survey has been tracking the UK population's social, moral, and political attitudes since 1983.