ANZ Hearing Health Collaborative | Hearing Health Collaborative

Background

Australia and New Zealand requires a stronger commitment to a standard of care for better hearing care through effective and patient-centred Guidelines, Education and Advocacy.

The ANZ hearing community advocated for the establishment of a body to oversee and progress work in this area and in 2021 a ‘coalition of the willing’ known as the ANZ Hearing Health Collaborative (ANZ HHC), formed to take action to address the unmet needs of adults with hearing loss.

The ANZ HHC is a well-established consortium led by four Co-Chairs, and over 70 volunteer members, including those with a lived experience of hearing loss, expertise in audiology, and the broader hearing healthcare community. They maintain a strong association with the American Hearing Health Collaborative as well as a global Task Force, responsible for developing Global Living Guidelines to improve the standard of care for adults with hearing loss.

Membership of the ANZ HHC encompasses a diverse group of stakeholders, including society representatives, speech and language therapists, general practitioners, hearing aid specialists, audiologists, ear, nose and throat, payer/policy, industry, non-government organisations, governmental agencies, academia, organisations implementing hearing care solutions within the community. Importantly, the group also includes representatives who provide real world experience of those with hearing loss.

Following a series of workshops to identify specific objectives for the group, the following position statement was developed:

Position Statement

The ANZ HHC will work collaboratively to:

Develop and deliver best practice guidelines that focus on the benefits of timely diagnosis and effective person-centred support, including access to sign language for all adults with hearing loss across their lifespan.
Prioritise hearing health and ensure that those at risk of hearing loss have regular hearing checks e.g., those over 50 years, those with family history or those with a noisy lifestyle.
Ensure that adults with hearing loss have equitable access to timely, effective, affordable, and culturally appropriate support to improve their lived situation in whatever form they require.
Ensure evidence-based tools and relevant training are available and accessible for consumers and health care professionals to guide assessment, referral, treatment, and care for children and adults with hearing loss across their lifespan.

Global vs. Local Guidelines

In 2020 a multidisciplinary group known as the Task Force embarked on an initiative to develop “Living Guidelines” for adults experiencing severe to profound sensorineural hearing loss. This Task Force consisted of 52 experts and cochlear implant users from around the world and marked the first step in the development of patient centred guidelines for adaption and adoption in country. The first version of “Living Guidelines” were launched in February 2023, and focused on the journey for a patient from initial diagnosis and referral for cochlear implantation through to rehabilitation and aftercare.

In ANZ the process of adapting the global Living Guidelines is independent and began proactively in 2021, via a series of collaborative workshops. It was determined through feedback from the ANZ HHC members, that work should commence to ensure that ANZ guidelines focus on the benefits of timely diagnosis and effective person-centred support for all adults with hearing loss across their lifespan. It was also agreed that Education and Advocacy should also play important roles in the successful delivery of guidelines in the two countries.

ANZ Hearing Health Collaborative Co-Chairs

Professor Catherine McMahon

Clinical Audiologist and Director of Audiology at MQ Health.
Catherine is also a senior scientist and project leader of the HEARing Co-operative Research Centre, the largest translational hearing research group in Australia. Her research aims to better understand the interactions between cognition on auditory perception in individuals with hearing loss, and to understand the changes that occur with hearing devices and training programs. Ultimately, she hopes to provide clinicians with improved tools to differentiate between speech perception problems that arise from auditory disruptions or cognitive limitations and to provide clinical tools to remediate this.

Jaime Leigh, PhD

Jaime Leigh, PhD, is Director of Cochlear Implant, Balance Services and Relationships at The Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital, where she also holds a senior clinical role within the Cochlear Implant Clinic. She has over 20 years of experience as a clinical and research audiologist, with expertise spanning adult and paediatric cochlear implantation. Jaime has led the development of the Victorian Cochlear Implant Program and, since 2023, has overseen strategic service development and stakeholder engagement across cochlear implant and balance services. She holds an Honorary Research Fellowship at the University of Melbourne, and her research focuses on translational outcomes in cochlear implantation, including candidacy, early intervention, speech and language development, and bilateral implantation. She is actively involved in the supervision of graduate research students at the University of Melbourne and La Trobe University.

Professor Bamini Gopinath

Cochlear Chair in Hearing and Health and Professor, Macquarie University Hearing (MU Hearing).
Professor Bamini Gopinath is an epidemiologist who has been actively involved in developing and conducting numerous population health studies. To date, she has co-authored over 200 peer-reviewed papers, several of which have been in high-ranking medical and health journals (with over 3500 citations to her name). Her publications have attracted >400 media stories with an estimated audience of 210 million people worldwide. Using large population datasets Bamini has provided novel community-based evidence on the health determinants and health outcomes associated with a range of chronic diseases and disability. Her ongoing research in the public health field aims to translate key study findings into health policy and practice, with the intention of targeting current gaps that exist in Australian healthcare.

Professor Payal Mukherjee MBBS. FRACS. PhD. MS

A.Prof Payal Mukherjee is an Adult and Paediatric ENT Surgeon subspecialising in Ear Surgery, Cochlear Implantation and lateral Skull Base Surgery. She is an executive member of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons (RACS) NSW state committee, chair of ASERNIP-S (Australian Safety and Efficacy Register of New Interventional Procedures in Surgery), the department head of ENT at the Sydney Adventist Hospital, Innovation Leads at both the RPA Hospital Institute of Academic Surgery and Chris O’Brien Lifehouse. Her PhD is in personalised medicine in ear surgery, specialising in 3D printing and Bioprinting with a focus on global translation of Australian innovation in biotechnology. She is on the TGA Advisory of Medical devices and expert panel of NSW Health Medical devices fund.

She is also proud to have strong advocacy in promoting surgical innovation, on gender equity in surgery, domestic violence as well as developing STEMM skills in young girls. She was a finalist of the NSW Premier Women of the year 2019 and in 2022, was awarded the RACS NSW women in leadership award as well as the Michael Donellan award for leadership in Surgery.

To contact the ANZ HHC and find out more please email anzguidelines@adulthearing.com or call 0436 442 400