Five years' experience of combined impedance and audiometric screening at school entry

Many papers and pilot studies have considered whether school entry auditory screening should include testing with tympanometry. Some of these papers expressed concern that this type of screening would lead to an excessive number of failures and an overloading of ENT facilities. School children in the Worcester district have been screened at school entry using tympanometry, combined with pure tone audiometry, for the past five years. This paper describes how the combined screening programme was set up, and the advantages that have accrued. It also shows that combined testing has not significantly increased the number of children referred to ENT. The author suggests that this combined tympanometry and audiometric screening should become the accepted way to screen school entrants.