Changes in the Audiology Service

Hello everyone,

I am responsible for the Audiology Services provided by NHS Lanarkshire. Over the last 18 months we have been inviting patients and carers to tell us about their experience of our services.

I’d like to highlight the changes we have made to our Open Access Clinics as a result of our patients’ feedback.

One of the busiest parts of our service is the ongoing repair and maintenance of hearing aids that our patients rely on to go about their everyday life. Historically we had some Open Access Clinics throughout Lanarkshire that patients could simply turn up to without making an appointment to have this work done.

Much of the feedback we received was around two issues with these clinics:

Waiting Time -because of the demand for this service, patients often had to wait for up to two hours for their hearing aid repair. To try and avoid this, patients began arriving before the clinics started in the hope of reducing the time they would have to wait. This resulted in even longer waiting times!

The second issue was that we didn’t run Open Access Clinics every day the departments were open. This meant that patients often had to attend departments outside their local area for their hearing aid maintenance if they weren’t sure what day the service was operating.

The solution

We aim to provide person-centred care for all our patients and personalised contact with the appropriate staff at a time when it is needed is a fundamental aspect of that.

We have subsequently introduced a telephone appointment system for patients that want to pre-book their visit:

Audiology Service Central Advice Line: 01698 456556 Text: 07795 401016 Monday - Thursday 9am - 5pm, Friday 9am - 4.30pm

We have also significantly increased the number of Open Access Clinics we provide to ensure there is a clinic every day Monday to Friday across each of the local area Audiology Departments within Lanarkshire.

The outcome

These changes have resulted in us being able to see more patients and the newly introduced appointment system is proving popular. Waiting times for walk-in patients has improved significantly and the initial feedback we have received has been very positive.

Whilst these changes seem relatively simple and straight forward we hope that they will benefit all of the people using this service.

If you have an experience of the Audiology Service you would like to share please speak to a member of staff, respond on Patient Opinion or visit the Your Feedback Section of the NHS Lanarkshire website to see the other ways to get in touch www.nhslanarkshire.org.uk

Kind regards