Service Engagement Team update

By Nicholas Orpin

Welcome to July’s update on our service delivery. With many Peer Support Volunteers already on their holidays, a continued ‘thank you’ to everyone still engaged in delivering and developing the services. Do enjoy any down time too, recharge and reset for the rest of the summer!

Community outreach

Across our five July drop-ins, 12 volunteers helped 40 people directly while volunteering over 35 hours of time.

The range of topics that people wish to discuss with you is vast, pulling on your knowledge of hearing loss and lived experience. We appreciate how you always sensitively manage each ask from our service users.

A flavour of subjects this month included:

• Local support (HoH clubs, lipreading, etc..)
• Assistive listening devices and smart technology
• First steps to talking to GP about an audiology referral
• Trying to self-train a ‘hearing dog’
• Encouraging an elderly relative to try wearing their hearing aids
• Managing hearing loss alongside other health conditions
• ‘Try before you buy’ options for assistive listening devices.

Thank you again to our Community Peer Support Volunteers for all the help and support given.

Do continue to use the Hello2 app to record session information and contact details of people wishing a follow-up Hearing Link – Hearing Link Local Contacts.

If you have access issues, please let me know.

Helpdesk

Helpdesk has been another popular source of support for people with hearing loss this month.

Enquirers have received 74 responses on a wide range of topics, often with unspoken layers that require sensitivity and understanding when replying.

Feedback received included: “Thank you so very much for this extremely detailed and helpful response. I greatly appreciate the time taken to respond to me. I will read and absorb all the information. Kind regards C”

Thanks to the Peer Support Volunteers who have responded – great work as always.

As mentioned previously, we will continue to accept Helpdesk enquiries through our normal pathways for the time being. Please continue to signpost to the service as a way for people to access our support.

Helpful Hours

Thanks to the Peer Support Volunteers who delivered this month’s sessions. Both sessions saw an uptake in interest, with 15 registrations in the month.

Here is some of the feedback following our audiology and healthcare webinars.

“I will definitely be completing the personal communication plan and will try to be better at insisting it is followed”.

“Be proactive and plan before/after appointments. Outstanding information”

“[I will] make notes, ask questions. Tell the Audiologist all additional information, and compare the ‘speech banana’ grid with my results”.

If you know of anyone who would benefit from any of our sessions, please signpost to Helpful Hours on the website – dates are now available to September.

Helpful Hours development

As previously reported the new Helpful Hours topic is underway and has a proposed public launch date of October. While this may seem some way off, there are some important milestones to consider in developing the materials for this topic, including:

• Canvassing your lived experience of the topic for content
• Creative services design time
• Trial presentations on Teams for feedback
• Final amends.

Please read our detailed update on how you can feed into this new topic.