Hear, Here: Connecting People to Health, Wellness and Happiness Through Better Hearing Health

Hear, Here: Connecting People to Health, Wellness and Happiness Through Better Hearing Health

We may live in a visual world. But our hearing is what connects us to it and the people around us. It is deeply intertwined into the way we experience the world around us, communicate, learn, teach and enjoy almost every aspect of life.

While hearing health is often underappreciated, the team at Hearing Partners aims to drive awareness not just about its importance and associated conditions but make hearing screening more accessible too.

According to Jennifer Lee, Senior Clinical Audiologist, the Hearing Partners outlet at Camden Medical – the tenth branch in the group – is their first full-fledged audiovestibular diagnostic clinic in Singapore.

“We provide a spectrum of hearing assessments for adults and paediatric patients,” she shares. These include hearing tests, speech audiometry and hearing aid assessments.

The well-appointed facility also provides more extensive tests to determine hearing thresholds.

“We also do ABR (auditory brainstem response) and ASSR (auditory steady-state response) which are done while patients are asleep. We can do this in-house under natural sleep or at the ambulatory surgery facilities within Camden Medical itself if sedation is required,” Christel Chue, Clinical Audiologist added.

This makes the assessment process more convenient and seamless for patients.

Vestibular Assessments

Apart from hearing, the Centre also conducts vestibular assessments.

These tests, assess how the vestibular system responds to different visual stimulation, postural changes and temperature changes in the ears to localise the cause of dizziness (video nystagmography), evaluate the vestibulo-ocular reflexes during head turns (video head impulse test), or monitor the storage mechanism and fatigability of the vestibular system by rotating the patient in a chair at different speeds (rotary chair test).

“The Centre at Camden Medical is also the first in Southeast Asia to have a TRV chair, a three-dimensional rotational chair which specifically diagnoses and treats benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV),” Jennifer adds. This chair can cater to BPPV patients with mobility issues, anxiety or weight concerns that make bedside manoeuvres difficult.

She elaborates that dizziness, specifically vertigo, is usually a symptom of an underlying condition.

BPPV is the most common cause of vertigo. It creates a false sensation of spinning or movement that is triggered during certain head movements (such as turning in bed and looking upwards).

This happens when calcium carbonate crystals in the ear dislodge and move freely within the semicircular canals. This condition can be easily managed with repositioning manoeuvres.

Other possible causes of vertigo include – but are not limited to – head injury, infection and inflammation (e.g. Vestibular Neuritis and Labrynthitis), Meniere’s Disease, migraine and low blood pressure. Vertigo stemming from the inner ear may be accompanied by hearing loss and/or tinnitus.

“More and more, we are seeing demand for our services,” says Jennifer.

Partly, this is because the general public is more informed and savvy than before. People are more proactive in taking charge of their health because they are aware that they can seek help for – and do not need to live with – issues such as tinnitus, hearing loss, and dizziness.

Christel adds, “But we also see younger populations starting to have hearing loss due to regular exposure to loud music, concerts, pubs and increase in noise pollution.”

She highlights that hearing health should be considered as a part of the preventive health movement. With the focus on Healthier SG and preventive health, she emphasises that beyond screening for chronic illness, maintaining our social and physical wellness and doing regular checks for our eyes and teeth, we should remember that hearing matters too.

Normalise Hearing Assessments

“We would like to normalise hearing assessments,” Jennifer says. As with any condition, regular monitoring allows for early detection of hearing loss before it becomes too severe.

“By the time someone realizes they have hearing loss, it is often too late to achieve optimal outcomes. Regular screenings can pick up small changes and identify possible causes of hearing changes so that further loss can be prevented.”

Jennifer shares that the management of hearing loss with hearing aids has also come a long way. In the past, while they served their function, a common complaint of hearing aids was that there would be a lot of interference.

“But like audio speakers, the technology is more refined now,” she points out.

“With the advancement of artificial intelligence, hearing aids can process sounds much better than before. They have sensors that can process sounds depending on the user’s movements and environmental changes, making not just speech, but ambient sounds clearer, more natural and balanced.

"Our BrainHearing philosophy emphasises that awareness of environmental sounds helps our brain to be sufficiently stimulated, so that it can identify, process and understand what we hear more efficiently, leading to lasting listening outcomes and speech clarity in hearing aid users.”

This, says Jennifer, is important to ensure hearing aid compliance to delay the onset of cognitive decline in seniors.

Studies have found that untreated hearing loss can lead to increased risk of dementia. Other researchers have discovered that hearing loss among older adults is independently associated with increased disease burden and poorer self-reported health.

All this underscores the Hearing Partner’s mission of care to bring accessible hearing health to the community with their personalised and patient-centred approach.

Jennifer agrees and concludes, “We are here for every step of their hearing journey.”