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Audiology Unit
The team at the Audiology Unit remained in charge throughout
1961 and the table below bears witness to a year of steady expansion.
Nevertheless, despite & full number of appointments per session, so
that an additional 89 children were seen during the year compared
with the previous twelve months, it was still not possible to keep
pace with the list of children waiting to be examined. To remedy
this, plans were well advanced by the end of the year for the introduction
of a second weekly session for, as Dr. Fisch, the consultant
otologist, states in his report, no child should wait longer than two
weeks for examination of his hearing.
Dr. Fisch points out that some of the equipment is still not
installed; an unwelcome delay, since without this apparatus it is not
possible to carry out speech audiometry. This, in turn, would
permit more exact evaluation of the efficacy of a hearing aid in
certain cases, and would allow observations to be made on the usefulness
of amplified speech in varying types of hearing loss.
As a natural outcome of an expanding unit, an additional burden
has fallen on all the members of the team, more especially upon the
audiometrician and the peripatetic teacher of the deaf. As the year
closed, steps were to be taken for a second audiometrician to be
added to the establishment; and Dr. Fisch stresses the need for
another peripatetic teacher, whose work must be considered as one of
the more important factors in the care of the child with impaired
hearing.
Additional personnel, however, require adequate facilities and,
although the audiology room provides excellent conditions in which to
test the children, ancillary accommodation is sadly lacking. For
example, the audiometrician has perforce to do her work in the Headmaster's
study and, whilst his full co-operation is forthcoming, such
an arrangement cannot be considered satisfactory. Moreover, the
peripatetic teacher needs a room in which to give the individual tuition
so essential for certain children and, as adumbrated in last year's
report, the time must come when impressions for ear moulds can be
taken, and hearing aids issued, at the unit itself.
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