Yesterday I attended the launch of the new National Commissioning Framework for Hearing Loss Services.

This is a document was developed by members of the Hearing And Deafness Alliance (a group of representatives from professional organisations, charity sector and patient groups) with NHS England and follows the launch of the Government’s cross-sector and cross-departmental Action Plan on Hearing Loss last year.

The new framework is aimed at supporting NHS commissioners in ensuring they understand the importance of services for people with hearing loss and the potential impact of un-managed hearing and communication difficulties. The document clearly indicates that it covers the whole age range from birth onwards but understandably given the much larger numbers involved, does have some emphasis on age-related hearing loss. But section 3.1 does make it clear that CCGs should be familiar with their commissioning responsibilities in relation to hearing and wider audiology services and appendix 3 helpfully clarifies the responsibilities of CCGs, NHS England and PHE in the complex environment of commissioning the various parts of a child’s audiology journey. Finally, section 8 stresses the need to move towards more outcome based commissioning and the crucial role of service specifications in setting out the key requirements for delivery of the service.

I was therefore very pleased be invited onto the Children’s Services Content Group and to lead on developing a model service specification for commissioners on paediatric audiology services along with a series of suggested outcome measures for children plus service performance outcomes, that services and commissioners can use to measure quality of the service. A link to this document is contained within the Framework or can be downloaded here. This is the first time we have had children’s outcomes used as commissioning measures of quality and we look forward to feedback and developing these further.

I’m now looking forward to working with NDCS colleagues to share this suite of documents widely with our networks, including service professionals and commissioners.