21 August 2015

New Hearing Guidance: Putting Patients at the Heart of NHS Care

A series of easy-to-use guides have been published to help the NHS increase access, quality and choice in adult hearing services whilst making the most of available resources

The guides, published this week, advise how stakeholders in NHS hearing care can work together to deliver the goals in the Five Year Forward View – including putting patients first, improving access and follow-up, delivering more care out-of-hospital and making better use of limited resources. Most importantly the guidance sets the stage to take preventative health more seriously by thinking of hearing care as a public health, rather than medical, challenge.

There is linked but separate guidance for NHS commissioners, NHS providers, local Healthwatch and Health & Wellbeing Boards. Each guide aims to empower local decision-makers with information so that they can achieve high-quality and responsive services on best value terms. In this way NHS hearing care can both do more for less and support the population to hear and age well.

David Hewlett, Chief Executive of the NCHA, said: “Building on the Action Plan on Hearing Loss, this set of easy-to-read guides bring together in one place prevalence data, research information and guidance to put patients and outcomes at the heart of NHS hearing care. They are fully consistent with NHS England’s Five Year Forward View and planning guidance.  They should bring greater transparency and accountability to local decision-making and better access, services, ongoing support and better results for patients."

Harjit Sandhu, Director of Policy, said: “Adult hearing loss is a major and growing public health challenge. These resources point the way to a modern and adaptive hearing care network that gets the best deal for patients, populations and taxpayers. This guidance is designed to support all providers deliver high-quality and responsive hearing care”.

Guidance inthis series:

NHS Commissioners

NHS Providers

Healthwatch

Health and Wellbeing Boards