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PAPERS: Heather M Fortnum, A Quentin Summerfield, David H Marshall, Adrian C Davis, John M Bamford, Adrian Davis, Christine Yoshinaga-Itano, and Sally Hind Prevalence of permanent childhood hearing impairment in the United Kingdom and implications for universal neonatal hearing screening: questionnaire based ascertainment study • Commentary: Universal newborn hearing screening: implications for coordinating and developing services for deaf and hearing impaired children BMJ 2001; 323: 536 [Abstract] [Full text]

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Time for a family friendly reality

Shamim Amis, Dominic Byrne   (10 September 2001)

Time for a family friendly reality 10 September 2001
Shamim Amis, specialist registrar obstetrics & gynaecology; writer and management consultant Newham General Hospital; self-employed, Dominic Byrne Send response to journal: Re: Time for a family friendly reality	Editor As parents of a baby with profound sensorineural deafness, Davis et al's commentary rang many bells (1). The absence of universal newborn screening feels nothing short of a national scandal to us. If it had been in place we would not have waited nearly a year to discover that our baby has profound deafness. A year is a long time to lose when the early years are critical to language and speech development. Unfortunately the "family friendly culture" and "seamless collaboration" aspired to in the pilot universal screening protocols seem a long way distant. Lack of urgency from health professionals, a system that designs delay into it rather than managing delay out, and no real sense of customer or family focus are the dominant characteristics of the health service we've encountered. The frustrating thing is that simple changes could make all the difference. We couldn't believe that medical professionals are still dictating letters to secretaries and using the postal system to take a week or more to refer cases onwards when e-mail could do it in a matter of minutes. We were surprised when we learnt that a leading London hospital relied on a retired professional who comes in "once a month" to interpret CT scans, automatically building in a six week delay. We were speechless when we tried to track him down and discovered that he had been off sick for four weeks yet this was not known to the departments that relied on him for results and that no alternative arrangements had been put in place. When our daughter received her hearing aids, it would have been helpful to know that we could have battery covers that guard against the tiny batteries falling out and being accidentally swallowed. It would have been useful to be given a simple tubing tool and shown how to fit new tubing, vital after a baby has pulled the tubing out countless times. It should be obvious for the hospital to demand improvements from its earmould supplier when faced with 2 week turnaround times that simply don't keep up with fast growing babies' ears. These are just a few of the problems we've encountered. None of them are difficult to solve. The fact that they exist suggests that the Family Friendly Hearing Services, with a "culture of service evaluation" and "feedback from parents" that Davis et al hope for, cannot arrive a moment too soon. Dr Shamim Amis, specialist registrar obstetrics & gynaecology, Newham General Hospital Dominic Byrne, writer and management consultant 2 Stanstead Grove London SE6 4UD shamim@btinternet.com dominic@biggerpicture.co.uk (1) Davis et al. Universal newborn hearing screening: implications for coordinating and developing services for deaf and hearing impaired children, BMJ, 7312, 8 September 2001