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Newborn Hearing Centre

Hillingdon Hospital
3rd Floor, Maternity Building
See also: Maternity & Midwifery

Newborn baby

Newborn Hearing Screening Programme (NHSP)
One to two babies in every 1000 are born with a hearing loss in one or both ears which will affect their social and language development.   Early identification is known to be important for the development of the child as support and information can be given to parents of a baby with a hearing loss in the first few weeks of life.

NHSP at Hillingdon Hospital

Our philosophy is to deliver an equitable, clinically robust, safe, family friendly service based on best practice. We aim to ensure all patents are offered hearing screening for their new born child within the first few weeks of life. The Newborn Screening Team is specially trained and dedicated to provide a high quality service working closely with the Neonatal Unit, Maternity and Paediatric Audiology. The Centre is situated on the 3rd floor the maternity building. The department has two full time members of staff, four part-time and we also have a manager who overseas all aspect of the service.  Our facilities include testing rooms, administrating office and a waiting room with baby changing facility.

The screening is carried out in hospital prior to discharge and those babies that are missed are offered the screening at the outpatient clinic. We offer the screening to 98% of the babies within 4 weeks of birth including those born in other hospitals or at home who come under Hillingdon PCT.

The programme is overseen by the MRC who set guidelines and protocol including targets for each site. Here at Hillingdon we are pleased to say that we have been Quality Assessed twice since the initial set-up and we have excellent results.

There is a National Website where anyone interested can find out more about the programme.

Newborn Hearing Screening Programme website