Hearing Australia kicked off Hearing Awareness Week on Wednesday 1 March with a special event in Sydney. The Prime Minister, the Hon Anthony Albanese MP, and the Hon Bill Shorten MP, Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme and Minister for Government Services, officially opened the Hearing Australia Centre in Marrickville.

Professor Greg Leigh, Director of the NextSense Institute and Chair of the Australasian Newborn Hearing Screening Committee shared an opinion piece on World Hearing Day which spoke to this year’s theme of broader access to ear and hearing care.

Professor Bamini Gopinath announced early results from the Australian Eye and Ear Health Survey at a Macquarie University Hearing event to mark World Hearing Day.  The interim results show a high proportion of non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal adults have suspected hearing loss and nearly half do not even know they have a hearing impairment.

This month to celebrate World Hearing Day, Hearing Australia is hitting the road on their first ever ‘Hearing the Nation Tour’! To make it easy for more Australians to receive expert hearing care, the Hearing Australia buses are stopping in city, rural and remote locations in every state and territory providing access to free 15-minute hearing checks.

NextSense highlights the great work Sue does with CICADA – the Cochlear Implant Club and Advisory Association – and the importance of having a community of support when experiencing hearing loss as an adult.

The Recommendations and Good Practice Statements are now open for public consultation and feedback from International Cochlear Implant Day, 25th February 2023, until 31st May 2023.

The publication explored the perspectives of urban parents and carers of young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children on their journey to diagnosis of persistent ear health and hearing problems. The publication received a Highly Commended in the PHRP Journal’s Excellence Awards for 2022!

To learn more about hearing care for children with hearing loss and some common misconceptions, we sat down with listening and spoken language therapists at The Shepherd Centre – Marina and Evelyn.

A recent NAL study aimed to identify the information sources, sociodemographic characteristics, lifestyle, and clinical history that led people to a hearing assessment, as well as to identify clinical recommendations for people with normal hearing measures. The results of this study raised more questions for future NAL research on our understanding of consumer behaviour as well as how to assist people with difficulties who are assessed as being in normal hearing range.

General Practitioners (GPs) play a key role in providing a pathway to hearing health services. NAL recently found that GPs must navigate a vast number of factors when referring their adult patients for a hearing assessment. NAL research is looking to further strengthen understanding, communication, and cooperation between audiologists and GPs. 

Many people attend hearing clinics complaining of difficulty hearing in noise despite having no clinically measured hearing loss, and are currently unable to be diagnosed and treated. This project, led by Senior Research Scientist, Jessica Monaghan, used machine learning to identify a subset of five questions that could accurately identify individuals with difficulty hearing in noise with 95% accuracy.

To celebrate World Hearing Day, Cochlear launched the final phase of a three-year partnership between Malala Fund and Cochlear Foundation to raise awareness about the barriers keeping millions of children and young people with hearing loss from accessing a quality education.