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The Newborn Hearing Screening Manager had a phone call from Public Health England last week congratulating the Plymouth screening team on their fantastic screening coverage figures over the past six weeks.

 

Due to the pandemic, the health visitors had stopped screening so screening coverage was greatly affected.  The Newborn Hearing team worked with the Audiology staff and changed the way the screen was delivered overnight to make sure they could still undertake newborn hearing assessments.  Public Health has been supplied with data from the national team which shows our screening coverage on a weekly basis.  For the week commencing 16/03/2020, our screening coverage dropped to 68% but since then we have improved week on week and for the past three weeks we’ve had figures of 82%, 86% and 83%.

 

Due to this work there have been deaf newborn children identified during this time who would otherwise not have been found for a very long time.

 

Public Health England wanted feedback on how we have managed to achieve these figures to share with other sites.  This is such an incredible achievement for all of us and has only been done through resilience, hard work and good communication.

 

To respond and deliver a service so quickly and so successfully in the middle of a pandemic is just fantastic and amazing - the Newborn Hearing Screening and Audiology team are a credit to the organisation and ensuring that despite the circumstances the patients will always come first.

 

Rachael Buller

Service Line Cluster Manager