Hearing Aid Evaluation

I oberserved a man who appeared to be in his early fifties. The client had come in two years earlier for a hearing evaluation but had not seen anyone since. His past audiogram showed a moderate sloping loss in his left ear and normal hearing in his right ear. The supervisor noticed that the asymmetrical loss did not show a noise notch which would then require medical clearnance in case of acoustic neuromas. First, the supervisor instructed the clinician to do a full up to date hearing evaluation to see if anything had changed.
A case history revealed that the client has been exposed to noise through shooting guns at a range and for hunting. The client revealed that he has problems with conversation in some situations.
Otoscopy was normal in both ears with just a little wax in the clients left ear. Tymps were both normal for each ear.
The next step was speech testing. The SRT for the right ear was 25dB and the left ear was 20dB. Word recognition was 96% for the right ear and 88% in the left ear.
The audiogram revealed a barely mild loss in the right ear in the higher frequencies. The left ear had a moderate to severe loss sensorineural loss. A noise notch suggests noise exposure (Katz, 2002).
Overall, the supervisor and clinician suggested an openfit Widex flash micro for the left ear, and the client decided to go with the suggestion. They are not in the process of ordering an aid.

The following website shows ASHAs guidelines for fitting someone with a hearing aid! http://www.asha.org/docs/html/GL1998-00012.html

Rappaport, J. M. & Provencal, C. Neuro-otology for Audiologists. In
J. Katz (Ed.), Handbook of clinical audiology (pp. 159-173). Baltimore: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.