£20m for digital hearing aids

State-of-the-art digital hearing aids will be provided on the NHS in a £20million scheme announced today.

The cash will modernise audiology departments in at least 30 extra NHS Trusts and see at least a third of the two million hearing aid users in the UK get the superior equipment, which will benefit children as well as adults.

At present, less than five per cent of those who require hearing aids have access to the latest technology. It is estimated that around a third of people who have analogue hearing aids, which were first designed in the Seventies, never use them because the quality of sound is so poor. Advanced digital hearing aids can be adjusted to suit the specific needs of each user. This means less interference from background noise and better hearing quality in a wider range of situations. Until now, cutting edge digital aids have been available only privately at about £2,000 each.

Today's announcement marks the successful conclusion of a campaign by the Royal National Institute for Deaf People in which 50,000 people wrote to their MPs about the issue and 215 MPs signed a cross-party Early Day Motion in support of the cause.