Hearing care at home during
COVID-19

You don’t need to do anything particularly special to protect your hearing at home during COVID-19 — just take sensible steps to look after your ears as you usually would. As we’d normally recommend, protecting your ears from prolonged exposure to loud noise and maintaining good ear health are your best bet.

Advice for hearing aid wearers

If you wear hearing aids, you’ll need to make sure you take care of them while you’re not able to get into store as easily and be extra mindful with cleaning to keep them in good condition. Here are some handy tips to remember:

• Before you handle any parts of your hearing aids, make sure you thoroughly wash your hands with soap and water
• Wipe your hearing aids down with a tissue or wet wipe before putting them in and after taking them out
• Store your hearing aids in their case when not in use and make sure to wipe down the case every time you use it
• To limit contact with any surfaces, pop your hearing aid onto a tissue when changing any batteries, domes or tubes
• Any domes or earmoulds that are placed directly into your ear should be wiped down with a tissue or wet wipe

You can find more information on managing your ear health here.

During this time, we are only open for urgent and essential services. So unfortunately, we have had to cancel all routine hearing appointments. If you believe your appointment is either urgent or essential, or you’re a key worker, please contact your local store to discuss.

Otherwise, we will get in touch with you as soon as we are given the go-ahead to get back to our normal services. You might also want to call your store once the government restrictions have been lifted to arrange an appointment convenient for you.

If you have hearing loss, working from home can raise some different challenges. For example, when you work in an office environment, people with a hearing impairment tend to subconsciously rely on visual cues, like lip reading, to help them throughout their working day.

This isn’t available if you’re having to use the phone when working from home. A good tip is to use a headset to allow both ears to receive sound – this will help with clarity and understanding. Just be careful not to have the volume cranked up too loud as this can distort the sound and could also cause longer term damage to your hearing.