Thursday 23, October 2025

We started the meeting by welcoming everyone to our 17^th group meeting in a new location – the University of Southampton Auditory Implant Service (USAIS).

The meeting objectives were to:

1. Discuss the service development project with Lina, a specialist speech and language therapist at USAIS.
2. Discuss the findings from the evaluation.
3. Discuss the RESTORE project with Nathan.
4. Discuss research project updates.
5. After the meeting – a tour of USAIS.

For the first activity, Lina Hansard introduced herself and talked about the work she is doing to improve the older adult patient pathway at USAIS. She discussed how she is gathering feedback from various stakeholders and is keen to find out what patients of the service and audiology service users think.

Group members were asked to share their thoughts on the following questions:

1. What would you say are 3 things (or more) your audiology/CI service is doing well to support you with your hearing loss and equipment. What 3 (or more) things are lacking, needs improvement?

2. What would you want from your audiology service to support you as you age/get older?

Next, we moved onto activity 2 which was to discuss findings from the evaluation.

From the analysis of the data from the evaluation, we have been able to identify areas that are working well and areas that require improvement from both the group member’s and researcher’s perspective.

The group were asked to get into four groups and were each given a table that outlined these findings and were asked to come up with actions for how we could either continue to do well or to make improvements.

1. Areas that are working well (From group member’s questionnaire)
2. Areas for improvement (From group member’s questionnaire)
3. Areas that are working well (From researcher’s questionnaire)
4. Areas for improvement (From researcher’s questionnaire)

We had a great discussion about what is working well and what could be improved.

We paused for a well-deserved coffee and cake break.

Next, Nathan Walker, an ENT surgical registrar and PhD researcher joined us virtually to talk about the RESTORE project and to get feedback from the group. RESTORE is a research project which aims to imrpove diagnosis, treatement and support fot childtern with Widened Vestibular Aqueduct (WVA) to foster betteer outcomers and quality of life.

Next, we were joined by Prof Nicci Campbell who came to give an update about the study  Unilateral and bilateral CI outcomes in adults:
Real-world hearing and user experience. Nicci wanted to thank and congratulate all at ALL_EARS@UoS on the very valuable work we do.

Kate thanked the group for attending and closed the meeting so the group could have a tour of USAIS.

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