Hearing aid fail

[roserodent]

Not sure if I am allowed to name names of the offending parties, but a national chain of hearing aid providers here in the UK has a special club you can join to get hearing aid batteries for half price. How do you order your batteries? Why, over the phone, of course. Buckets of fail.

Comments

[yarram]

Because, of course, everyone has someone available to make those phone calls for them. And there are no medical confidentiality issues involved whatsoever. Nevermind the consequences of playing the "Telephone" game over the damn telephone.

(Oh, sorry to break your sarcasm meter...)

[barakta]

My audiology depts typically have policy which requires me to book an appointment to get my hearing aid repaired over the telephone. I pointed this out to them and made a LOT of fuss about "get a hearie to do it for you"....

I do have a textphone, but why don't they have an SMS or email option as well - both are cheap and viable.

Problem is 90% of hearing aid users are those who have acquired a hearing loss and audiologists are usually hearing - hearies don't realise how annoying phones are and forget how little many of us can use phones.

I have great fun at work saying "err I don't know X's extension I never use the phone" "nope despite being office geek I don't actually know ANYthing about the phones cos I have never used them".

[roserodent]

My audiology depts typically have policy which requires me to book an appointment to get my hearing aid repaired over the telephone.

Yep, it seems this is sadly not at all unusual http://accessibility-fail.dreamwidth.org/24560.html
Unless we are coincidentally both at the same one department that does this, but I doubt it. My department specifically only deals with mild to moderate age-related hearing loss, so I let them off a little bit. I only go there because there is a lack of wheelchair access to the department that is supposed to deal with it. That's a whole other dimension of fail.

They don't understand the whopping difference in what I can hear by phone compared to in person as the phone compresses all the frequencies into the ones I can't hear! I also can't hold a phone still over that one nanometer sweet-spot on my hearing aid where the signal actually gets into the hearing aid, and when I do manage it the mouthpiece is a foot away, so I have to keep turning the phone around. I just got a textphone.

[codeman38]

They don't understand the whopping difference in what I can hear by phone compared to in person as the phone compresses all the frequencies into the ones I can't hear!

YES, YES.

This is pretty much my issue as well. I hear great in the bass and high treble frequencies (I listen to a lot of electronica because of this :-p). Those, naturally, are the ones that are horribly muffled over the phone.

And trying to explain to people that although I can hear them great face to face, I'm going to constantly be asking for repetition over the phone, just horribly confuses them because they likely don't even realize those frequencies are missing.

[amadi]

I don't see a problem with naming names. It's true, and it's informative for those who are making decisions about what sort of hearing aid they want to purchase.