Audiologist, Martin Montgomery who is based in the Ulster Hospital, Dundonald, has been living with a hearing loss for 43 years and is now using his own personal experience to improve the quality of care for patients with a hearing loss.
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00:00 What I love being an audiologist is I have been a patient of, I have a severe hearing loss.
00:05 As you can see I wear two hearing aids.
00:07 I've been wearing hearing aids for 43 years.
00:10 I just love the fact that I can bring my own personal experience.
00:14 What the audiology department does first and foremost is they work with people that have a hearing loss
00:20 or diagnose them with a hearing loss.
00:22 We work closely with our ENT departments to perform diagnostic tests to confirm if anybody has a hearing loss
00:29 and we also work with long-standing patients like myself who wear hearing aids
00:33 and in that we would make sure that the hearing aids are kept up to date.
00:37 We would carry out reassessments of the hearing, fit them with the hearing aid
00:42 and also carry out rehabilitation and those are just some of the things that we do.
00:47 I've been hard of hearing for over 30 years.
00:50 I rely on my hearing aids and if I didn't have them I would be very, very lonely.
00:57 I felt more relaxed today because the both who were dealing with me were hard of hearing
01:04 so they knew when to speak and what signs and things.
01:10 I always bring somebody with me to meetings and stuff where I felt today I could have coped with all this on my own.
01:17 I think the fact is that I have been a patient of audiology and I have been on the receiving end
01:24 where maybe I felt that my hearing has deteriorated or I'm not just hearing as well
01:29 and I know the impact of the audiologist has had on me and making adjustments to my hearing
01:34 just to make my life a bit easier.
01:36 So I've been in the shoes of the patients that I deal with
01:40 and I want them to have the same service that I have had myself.
01:43 It's certainly one of those professions if you feel that you would like to make a difference
01:48 then certainly this could be the job for you.
01:50 So a typical day can be very different so there are different types of clinics
01:54 so it may be speech and noise testing, doing repairs,
01:57 maybe another thing would be fitting somebody with a hearing aid for the first time.
02:01 I would say the future of audiology is going to be very exciting.
02:04 It's going to be a case of 'watch this space'.
02:07 My team today was excellent. They went above and beyond for me.
02:11 [Music plays]