Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if his Department will take steps to improve the testing and diagnosis of hearing impairment conditions in NHS hospitals.

The Government is taking a number of steps to improve the testing and diagnosis of hearing impairment conditions in National Health Service hospitals. NHS England is working to improve diagnostic services, including audiology, through its National Diagnostic Transformation Programme. Under the programme, a national data collection for audiology services is being coordinated from June 2023. The data collected will capture activity related to waiting times, equipment, workforce, facilities, and digital. The results from this will inform service improvement and future workforce planning at local, regional, and national level.

There is currently a small number of audiology services across England that are commissioned to accept self-referrals. NHS England is aiming to expand direct access and self-referral where general practitioner involvement is not clinically necessary, including for hearing aid services, through the Delivery Plan for Recovering Access to Primary Care and the 2023/24 Priorities and Operating Planning guidance.

During 2023/34 NHS England will also be reinforcing the improvement guide ‘Approaches to Addressing Audiology Waiting Times’, which was developed for local integrated care systems in December 2022, through shared learning webinars.