Applying the Hearing Aid Fitting Standard to Selection for Adults

The recent hearing aid fitting standard for adults outlines the minimum practice for audiologists fitting adult patients with hearing loss. This article focuses on three items of the standard (5, 6, and 7), which focus on the selection of unilateral/bilateral hearing aids, hearing aid style, and coupling, in addition to feature selection. The standard emphasizes that decisions around these three aspects should be recommended for a patient in an individualized manner, based on their needs assessment. For these decisions, the needs assessment might include measures of speech-in-noise ability, social network size, patient preference, and a trial period. Additional elements could include assessments of manual dexterity, binaural interference, and attitude toward hearing aids. However, there are a multitude of ways to practice clinically and still meet the items outlined in the standard. As long as the selection decisions consider individualized patient factors and are capable of meeting validated prescriptive targets, a clinician would be meeting the adult hearing aid fitting minimum standard guidance. In addition, despite the large number of past studies supporting these standards, additional, high-quality research including randomized, controlled, clinical trials are still needed to further support appropriate minimum standard recommendations.