Achieving consensus on newborn hearing screening

The Map has helped Newborn Hearing Screening Programme create a national understanding while identifying opportunities for local flexibility. It has helped bring standards up to a uniform level and given around 16 specialities a shared view so they can apply their skills without having to gather information again. By providing the latest medical, social and educational information it is helping parents to be the best advocates for their children.

Professor Adrian Davies, Director, explains the benefits the Map has brought to England’s Newborn Hearing Screening Programme. (6:12)

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Transcription

Adrian Davies: With screening as a highly focused population activity it is important that we have an understanding from Newcastle to Plymouth about how that’s going to be implemented. The Map of Medicine has enabled us to focus on the key parts of that pathway from even before the baby’s born, but how we get information to women, how they understand what the screen is about and then what happens after that screen.

With children that identify as having a hearing problem maybe at that stage, then clearly they have to have more assessments for their children, there has to be some diagnostic assessment and then support for the family and that’s helped us define what that might be and enable people from a local perspective if they are running a service in Cornwall, which is quite a rural sort of place, to adapt how they do things so that it’s best for their population compared to hamlets in London where you’ve got an entirely different set of difficulties in terms of how you would make that organisation.

So for us it’s been quite a unified thing, bringing people together because you have to say what’s important to you, what are the key things and where can we be flexible.

Within newborn hearing screening we’ve got a large number of professionals, maybe 15 or 16 that I often talk about but there are many others as well so it’s important that they all have a view of what’s happening and that we eventually come to a place where each of those individuals can help the family and child without having to get them to repeat their story, without going through a large amount of old information so they can bring their specialist skills to bear as rapidly as possible and I think the Map will enable us to do that.

Interviewer: So you would almost describe it as a tool in overcoming the patchiness that we sometimes hear about in the NHS nationally?

Adrian Davies: Yes, there is a huge variability sometimes in the way that services are delivered, you like to hope that services that you work with are uniform across the country but, from my experience of auditing lots of services in the UK I know how the distribution quality can often be uneven for reasons that aren’t necessarily the fault of those particular locales or whatever, so what it should enable us to do is to uniformly bring up the quality of what people do.

Interviewer: So how do you see it making a difference to your patients?

Adrian Davies: In making a difference to how particularly young, deaf children and their families, I would think it works in two ways. Firstly that whether they are in the West Midlands or whether they are in London there is uniform expectation about what those services can deliver. I think secondly it has to be, there are lots of difficult choices that parents have to make along the management route and really something like this can give them the up to date, professional information, medical, social, educational information and I think that will enable them to be the best advocates for their children.

Interviewer: There are many within the Health Service who feel that another electronic network maybe the straw that breaks the camel’s back, there have been poor experiences along the way with electronic networks. What would you say to people within the Health Service to convince them that the Map is something worth spending time over?

Adrian Davies: The Map of Medicine has a very strong vision of where the future for Healthcare can be, it also is very realistic in working through the constraints that people have, both in terms of time and in terms of money, so I think it can be a very powerful force for going in that direction.

Interviewer: Professor Adrian Davies, thank you very much for your time.

Adrian Davies: Thank you.