Hearing Aids: Staffordshire

(asked on 20th April 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will take steps to ensure that North Staffordshire Clinical Commissioning Group is compliant with the revised NICE guidance on hearing loss in adults in relation to the provision of hearing aids to people with mild and moderate hearing loss, published in June 2018.


Answered by
Helen Whately Portrait
Helen Whately
Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
This question was answered on 29th April 2020

From 6 January to 1 March this year the Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) ran an engagement exercise called Difficult Decisions to consider clinical priorities in these local areas.

One area under consideration is hearing loss in adults as patients in North Staffordshire do not currently automatically qualify for hearing aids if their hearing loss is mild or moderate, while they do in Stoke-on-Trent and the rest of Staffordshire.

Currently work on analysing and further developing proposals is paused as clinicians engaged in the work need to prioritise frontline duties, due to COVID-19. The CCGs currently cannot give an estimate of when this work will continue.

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