NHS Forth Valley Audiology

From our 2022 Story Board:

Desired Outcome: staff feel more involved in decisions, more staff opportunity to develop idea time

Action: Increase frequency of staff meetings (TEAMS) and ensure longer staff meetings scheduled every 3-4 months

Desired Outcome: Ensuring staff are confident in their role, provide peer support, governance

Action: Clinical competencies to highlight any training needs.

Since December 2023 the NHS Forth Valley Audiology team has closed its doors on the last Tuesday afternoon of each month and dedicated the afternoon to training.

TURAS forms the first part of the afternoon, allowing staff to catch up on mandatory training. The staff meeting follows this session, allowing staff to have more regular input into decisions and share ideas. The day also has a training need, so far this year we have had training from many of our Hearing Aid companies coming to visit, as well as our Health and Wellbeing team where we all joined in with some mindfulness (this resulted in our Wellbeing Wall in Stirling!)

This has vastly increased our capacity to meet and learn, and the team has come on miles as a result.

We have continued with our rolling competencies and also supported staff to seek training opportunities to help with their role.

Our Band 2 admin staff are up-skilling to a more clinical role in supporting hearing aid repair and maintenance.

So far we have started training 2 x Associate Audiologists to become fully BSc qualified Audiologists, upgraded a Band 5 Audiologist to a Paediatric Specialist Band 6 with external training booked in place, and our Band 7 Newborn Hearing Screening staff to refresh or complete their national training.

We have supported NHS Ayrshire & Arran paediatric long waits by testing over 100 of their under 5s.

FV Ear Nose and Throat service issues – we created a new pathway to allow a one of our Band 6 staff move to Band 7, taking on a seconded role to assess direct to Audiology and now all non-urgent ear referrals are seen direct in Audiology.  Around 60% of patients who previously needed to see a consultant are directly managed in Audiology only now.

Our Head of Paediatric Audiology is about to complete her equivalence Higher Training Scheme assessment in paediatric assessment, all through external training which improves our governance in this area.

We have tackled many of the issues that we knew would also be highlighted in the national review of Audiology.

Through our improvements we have been highlighted by the review team as one of the most improved services over the last year, as such we were visited by the Minister for Public Health, Jenni Minto, in August 2023.

We recently were announced as the British Academy of Audiology (BAA) Team of the Year 2023 because of the work we have achieved.

And we are not stopping here! We have plans to develop a new Glue Ear pathway to manage children with hearing loss to avoid surgery.

It has been a wonderful year and we are so looking forward to the award ceremony in November when we can properly celebrate.

Invest time and funding in staff and you will reap the benefits.

Stephanie Doody-Orr

Audiology Service Manager

NHS Forth Valley