Liam O’Dell: Where’s the quality standard for our audiology services?

How do we know that something isn’t working when we don’t have the opportunity to measure its success?

Without a sense of quality for audiology services, a deaf person’s own experience becomes the standard.

When nine in 10 NHS commissioners don’t have the ‘bare minimum’ information on audiology, we have a system in place which leaves both decision-makers and deaf service users in the dark.

The solution is simple. The Improving Quality in Physiology Services accreditation, shortened to the rather affectionate acronym IQIPS, is described by the UK Accreditation Service (UKAS) as “a professionally-led assessment and accreditation scheme that is designed to help healthcare provider organisations ensure that patients receive consistently high quality services, tests, examinations and procedures delivered by competent staff working in safe environments”. This includes audiology.

The downside? The scheme isn’t mandatory, and with the NHS still facing funding pressures across the country when delivering its services, we are left with a situation where some trusts have the accreditation, and others don’t.

The postcode lottery we’re currently seeing in education for deaf children extends to audiology services too.

The way to tackle this is by levelling the playing field, by making the scheme mandatory with financial support from the Government.

I’ve already referenced the nine in 10 commissioners statistic, but when UKAS themselves say that their accreditation can help commissioners to buy services such as audiology, making IQIPS mandatory seems like a rather practical solution to the lack of information held by clinical commissioning groups.

Like with most suggestions to make a service more accessible, the wider rollout of the scheme wouldn’t just benefit deaf people using audiology services. With a focus on physiology, patients in other areas such as cardiac, respiratory and sleep would also know how their local provision is performing compared to other services.

All of this is important when there’s no centralised data source for audiology information, or a sense of quality.

As such, it falls to charities to provide a vital level of accountability. Action on Hearing Loss with its recent Valuing Audiology report is just one piece of research which paints a pretty bleak picture of the situation.

Data collection like this is essential to inform their campaigning work, but charitable organisations shouldn’t have to file countless Freedom of Information requests to make these statistics public, when they should be available for patients to access immediately. Action on Hearing Loss themselves have called for audiology information to be published consistently and publicly, and I completely agree.

With all this being said, I must make the point that every audiology service is different. In my case, I have a wonderful audiologist (and indeed, a great audiology service as a whole) who makes sure everything’s in working order.

Yet, at the same time, it’s about making sure that my positive audiology experience is one shared by every deaf person, and creating a system where these experiences can be compared – not only to see where improvements are needed, but to identify best practice too.

Photo: Ollie Cole.

Liam is a mildly deaf freelance journalist and blogger from Bedfordshire. He wears bilateral hearing aids and can be found talking about disability, theatre, politics and more on Twitter and on his website.