There is no such thing as a one solution strategy for all. Every individual is different and finding the right key to unlock your potential is our role.
How we care
Taking the first step to improving your hearing by visiting us for a Consultation & Discovery Session is a positive step and in the right direction. However, we know that making this decision is not always easy and as professionals we need to ensure that you are ready for change and committed to take an active role in your treatment programme before moving forward with any type of care.
Your initial Consultation & Discovery Session at Cubex is all about you. Our Audiologist will spend as long as it takes to understand your unique needs, your challenges and self-motivation to improve your hearing, communication and your general state of living.
The important thing to understand with hearing loss is that it is a communication disorder. And as such it doesn’t just affect you, but your family, your friends and anyone surrounding you. We believe that it is vital to involve those who matter the most from the very outset.
How we test
The Hearing Sensitivity Test
Following a visual examination of your ear, ear canal, ear drum and a pressure test of your middle ear a Pure tone hearing test is performed.The Pure Tone hearing test is a key to providing a measurement of your hearing sensitivity. It helps us determine the type and degree of hearing loss. You will be required to use a headset through which a series of tones are presented at various pitches (frequencies) and volumes (intensities) to one ear at a time. You are required to press a button or raise your hand each time a tone is heard, no matter how soft. The softest volume (intensity) required to hear each tone is recorded on an audiogram.
Functional Brain Hearing Tests
Hearing loss is generally identified by conducting a routine pure tone hearing test as described above. This gives you insight into your hearing sensitivity which is a great starting point. Although essential for determining type and degree of hearing loss, pure tone tests do not provide a clear depiction of your ability to listen to and understand speech.Speech is complex and many factors impact on our ability to understand it, particularly in challenging or noisy environments. Fortunately, Cubex is one of the few audiology practices in the UK that routinely test these abilities. Rather than just relying on a pure tone stimulus to detect hearing, speech tests are performed in quiet and in noise to provide a better perspective of a person's functional hearing. Speech tests include:
- Speech Audiometry
Rather than relying on a tonal stimulus, speech audiometry assesses your ability to discriminate speech. This gives a much better ‘real world’ perspective of your hearing. Furthermore, it carries additional diagnostic information as it is a good indicator of where in the auditory system the hearing loss lies. This is important as the location of the hearing loss can relate to the functional benefit you may experience if you are a candidate for a personalised hearing solution.
- Speech-in-noise tests
Speech-in-noise tests quickly and easily measure your ability to hear speech in noise. We run these tests in simulated real-life situations such as social gatherings, dinners and noisy environments. It better reflects 'real-world' hearing and listening ability.
- LiSN-S PGA - The new benchmark in speech-in-noise testing.
The Listening in Spatialized Noise-Sentences Test, or LiSN-S, assesses your ability to understand speech when there is noise coming from different directions.
Cognitive function tests
In addition to exploring your hearing sensitivity and your ability to understand speech, here at Cubex, we also assess the key cognitive skill sets that are relevant to successful hearing and communication.The role of cognition in hearing ability is one that we cannot ignore. Your ears are one part of an auditory system that collects and delivers a wide variety of sound signals; it is in the brain that listening happens - the act of applying meaning and making sense of sound. Two people could have the same hearing sensitivity, but how their brain processes information and the mental effort required to do so will be completely different.Although it may appear that the communication problems experienced is due to hearing loss alone, often this is not the primary issue. In many instances, it may be related to the ability to filter out distraction, focus attention, process information and remember information. The fact is, successful and effortless hearing is reliant on these key cognitive skills and for a person with hearing loss, they are even more reliant on these skills. During our Consultation & Discovery Session, we explore the skill sets that are vital for good communication and daily living in general. This approach, which is unique to Cubex, allows us to provide you with a real awareness of your current state of living and enables us to provide the best possible support that is genuinely individualised.
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I have never had a test that captured so much of the real difficulties I am faced with everyday. It really helped put things into perspective for me and my daughter. A truly powerful experience! We all finally understood my communication. – Mrs. Zand, Cubex patient since 2006.
How we treat hearing
An Individualised Approach
At Cubex, our treatment and management plans aim to enable people to rediscover their hearing and stay socially connected and active in their communication world. Our goal is to ensure that our patients are able to perform all day in difficult communication situations by minimising the amount of listening effort and energy or “Brain Power” used in order to understand auditory information – also known as cognitive load. In short, we aim to make communication easy and this cannot be done without expert knowledge and guidance from our Audiologists, a motivated patient and the most individualised support available.
What happens if I have a hearing loss?
If diagnosed with hearing loss, we ensure a broader assessment of your individual characteristics and design and treatment plan around you. We are advocates of providing people with the tools that support not only hearing but also the ability to process and interpret information with greater ease. Fundamentally, we understand that good cognitive skills are as essential to communication as improved hearing.If appropriate, and if you are ready, we may prescribe hearing technology as part of a wider treatment plan which we personalise and optimise over a period of 4 weeks.There is increasing evidence for the ‘plasticity of the brain’, or more simply our brain’s ability to adapt and change at any age. Given that hearing aid technology is not restorative, at Cubex technology goes hand-in-hand with cognitive skills training to promote the brain’s ability to adapt and effectively use acoustic information. In addition, clinical mindfulness and lifestyle practices may be used to increase your internal capacity to respond to life’s demands and to recover from the mental fatigue that is often seen with hearing loss.
Treatment plans can include the following:
Hearing Aids
Personalisation
Brain Training"
Counseling
You and Yours
Hearing aids are highly sophisticated instruments that are designed to deliver sound to your brain. When we personalise a hearing aid for you, we are in essence providing a brand new sensory experience for your brain.Hearing aid chips are extremely small, extremely fast and very efficient. We work with only the best and signal processing platforms that have had many years of research and development. Most enable the exchange of vital sound information between both ears for a more natural, authentic sound experience, just like we do with our ears naturally. Read More on hearing aids here
A Personal Sound Experience!
Hearing is so subjective so naturally, there is no such thing as one solution for all!At Cubex, we believe that everyone should be viewed as an individual! Your experience of sound is as unique as a fingerprint and as hearing care professionals, we need to address the many factors that affect how you respond to amplified sound – how your ears work, how you process information at the level of the brain, your sound preferences, your experiences and more.Audiological research and development into finding ways to enhance end users listening experience continues to grow rapidly. We believe that it is important to strike the balance between hearing treatment technology, individual abilities and preferences to help meet the unique needs of each patient.Hearing aids used in our rehabilitation are carefully prescribed, personalised and optimised to your individual needs, preferences and abilities. It is essential that you and your loved ones are active participants in the process in order to achieve optimal results. In addition to the time spent with our Audiologists at our premises, there is some work for you to complete at home
Hearing is a sense, listening is a skill!
We believe that hearing care is not just about making things audible. What we aim to improve is clearly laid out by the World Health Organisation:
Hearing – Perception of sound
Listening – Hearing with attention and intent
Comprehension – Understanding information
Communication – Two way process
In addition to using hearing aid technology, auditory training programmes are used to help you re-learn the skill of listening and comprehension.As hearing deteriorates, the brain is deprived of essential acoustic information. The longer you deprive your brain of sound, the harder it is to re-adjust to sound. Just as physical therapy helps rebuild muscles and adjust movements to compensate for physical weakness or injury, auditory training programmes are designed to help you re-develop skill of listening.We recently commissioned Ipsos MORI to conduct online research into British adults' views on hearing rehabilitation. The survey showed that British adults consider that "paying attention to what is being said "is as important as "having good hearing" in order to be able to hear conversations well (98%and 97% important respectively). This confirmed the importance of listening – the process of hearing with intention and attention – in effective communication. However, if one cannot hear, it is difficult to listen. A hearing aid combined with listening training is essential for successful communication. This insight reinforced the need for...
Hearing loss affects the people in different ways and it is important that we are mindful of how it may impact on an individual.
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross identified the ‘5 steps of grief’ – a process that people go through when coming to terms with loss. It is most commonly referred to when someone has lost a loved one.
The Grief Process
Denial
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance
Psychologists have found that when a person comes to terms with the ‘loss’ of their hearing, they go through a similar process of grieving. We believe that it is important to be sensitive to the stage at which the person with hearing loss is and help them deal with their feelings and attitudes before proceeding with any type of care.
Hearing loss affects the patient and the people with whom he or she communicates with on a regular basis.If you are experiencing signs of hearing loss, It Is important to think of the people in your life and consider how your hearing loss might impact your relationships with them.Communication partners – people with whom you communicate on a regular basis, including spouses, children, friends, co-worker and caregivers – play an important role at various points along the journey to better hearing. These partners pass through a wide range of feelings and experiences themselves on a journey that parallels and intersects with the patient's journey.Tools used during our counseling sessions are aimed at helping you improve your communication in your daily life by establishing common goals with those who matter most.
Hearing Care designed around you
What our people said about our personalised care…
"I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." - Maya
PATIENT TESTIMONIALS
What a difference your expert audiological help has been in changing my life! I feel a much happier person than of late. I am very happy indeed with my decision to be with Cubex and yourself, particularly, as my audiologist. Trust, sincerity and honesty are irreplaceable. - Mr John Harvey
Dear AdamI have written some time ago to say thanks for the way I was treated at Cubex.I have to write again to say another Big Thank You for the continued high standards and genuine care I have been receiving, now mostly from Melissa and Fatima who try to squeeze my appointments around my 'ridiculous o'clock' working times.Melissa has been so helpful in helping me keep my new full time job which now involves over the phone patient assessments, a very stressful thing for a person with hearing loss. I am sure you find that it is not just restored or improved hearing and functionality that makes the difference to your patients lives, but the restored confidence and belief that they can actually function in "the normal world " on a par with "normal" people. Your team at Cubex continues to deliver that.Many, many thanks for all you do, and for helping me stay in nursing - the job I really love.Best regards to you and the team - Malgorzata Bukowska
PS On the confidence and reconnecting with the world front, I got another job interview invite for a role that is fully telephone based, after the initial telephone screening interview, so not bad at all.