Referrals to the Hearing Loss team
We can only accept referrals which are accompanied by an NHS diagnosis from the audiology department.
Babies may be referred to audiology after their newborn hearing screening test, if there was no clear response in the test. If you are worried about your older child's hearing talk to your health visitor or school nurse. They can do a hearing test and refer to audiology if necessary.
An audiologist will assess your child's hearing and make a diagnosis. If they are found to have hearing loss and meet our criteria, the hospital will ask if you would like a referral to our service. If you do, you will be asked to sign a hospital consent form.
What is hearing loss?
Hearing loss happens when part of the ear or the auditory nerve isn't working properly. It can cause different levels of hearing loss: mild, moderate, severe or profound.
You can learn more about deafness from the National Deaf Children's Society.
Moving to Hampshire
If you are moving to Hampshire your current Specialist Teacher Advisory Service will notify us directly. Your child must have been seen by an audiologist before we can support you in Hampshire. We will then contact you to request your consent to us seeing your child and to share medical information.
Our criteria
We support
a child or young person aged from 0 to 25 years:
- with medically diagnosed hearing loss
- whose hearing loss is unilateral, mild, moderate, severe or profound and conductive or sensori-neural
We also support children and young people who have a multi-sensory impairment (MSI) i.e. vision impairment and hearing loss.
Contacting you
If your child is referred to us after their Newborn Hearing Screening Programme test, we aim to contact you within 48 hours of the referral being made. If your child is referred at another time but is still eligible for our support, we aim to contact you within two weeks.
Your consent
If we confirm your child meets our criteria, we will write to you to request your consent to us seeing your child and to share medical information. If we don't receive your consent we can't proceed with supporting your child.
Next steps
If your child meets our criteria, we will visit in the home, at pre-school, at school and at college