Our audiology service at Evelina London Children’s Hospital is one of the largest in the UK. Evelina London is also recognised as one of the world’s leading children’s hospitals. We can help your child with their hearing.
Experts in children's hearing
Our specialists provide innovative hearing assessments for children of all ages, from babies to young adults. This includes routine tests, as well as caring for children with complex needs.
Working as part of a multidisciplinary team, we can also refer children to our specialists in children’s ear, nose and throat (ENT) medicine and surgery if required. For example, for the treatment of glue ear and hearing implant surgery.
Our children’s hearing services
We provide both routine and specialist hearing services:
Routine services
- Our routine services include hearing tests for children of all ages as well as treatment for children with middle-ear infections.
Specialist services
- We provide specialist hearing assessments for children with complex needs at our Hummingbird clinic. This includes children with autism spectrum disorder as well as those undergoing social communication assessments.
- We can fit hearing aids for children with significant hearing difficulties, as well as provide hearing assessments under general anaesthesia and sedation if needed.
We offer gentle, age-appropriate assessments tailored to each child, which can include:
- clinical history
- otoscopy (looking in the ears)
- tympanometry (a middle ear check of congestion or glue ear)
- otoacoustic emission (an automated check of inner ear health)
- hearing tests
We tailor our hearing tests depending on the age of each child:
- Newborn babies (0-3 months).
- Pre-school age children (7 months to 5 years).
- School-age children (older than 5).
Hearing tests for every age
We tailor our hearing tests depending on the age of your child. Find details of our assessments below.
For newborns, initial hearing assessments will take between 90 to 120 minutes.
Type of hearing tests
The type of hearing tests we offer for infants is an ‘auditory brainstem response’ test.
For more information about this hearing assessment, please watch our video about your baby’s first hearing test.
For pre-school age children, initial hearing assessments will take between 45 and 60 minutes.
Most preschool aged children are seen by 2 audiologists.
Type of hearing tests
The type of hearing test we offer for children aged approximately from 7 months to 2.5 years is a ‘visual reinforcement audiometry’ test.
During this test we teach your child to react to sounds by turning their head towards a reward, usually a picture of a familiar TV character. We then adjust the types and volume of the sounds to determine their hearing levels.
For children aged approximately 2.5 to 5 years we use a test called ‘play audiometry’.
During this test we teach your child to perform a game based task in response to a sound such as throw a ball or stack a cup. We then adjust the types and volume of the sounds that we play to determine their hearing levels.
For more information on how to prepare your child for this type of test, please watch our video about practicing for a hearing test.
We often use headphones to find out more about your child’s ears so it is helpful for you to practice using headphones with your child at home before your appointment with us.
If your child has any favourite toys, games or television shows, please let us know as we may be able to use these during the appointment.
School-age children will be seen by one audiologist. Usually we will ask your child to wear headphones and press a button when they hear a sound, this test is called ‘pure tone audiometry’.
You may find it useful to talk with your child about their hearing before the appointment to help them think of anything they may want to tell us, or any questions they may want to ask.
All children’s hearing tests are dependent on the co-operation and attention of the child. While our expert team are very experienced in performing children’s hearing tests it may not always be possible to perform a complete hearing assessment during one appointment and we may recommend a follow up appointment to complete testing.
We will also discuss the results with you during the appointment and afterwards we will write a clinical appointment report for your records.
Hearing test prices
| Audiology treatment | Description | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-school age hearing assessment | Over six months of age | £290 |
| School age hearing assessment | 5-18 years | £230 |
| Comprehensive infant assessment | Auditory brainstem response testing under natural sleep ( under 3 months) | £605 |
| Otoacoustic emissions testing | An automated test of inner ear health | £50 |
| Speech testing | A type of hearing test using speech sounds | £50 |
| Acoustic reflex testing | A test of a muscle reflex in the ear | £50 |
| Custom swimming ear plug | One single plug | £60 |
| Custom swimming ear plug | One pair of plugs | £80 |
Related services
Find out more about related investigations, treatments and services for children's audiology:
Locations
Our children's hearing experts provide care at these locations:
Discover our team of children's audiology experts
Our clinical team is made up of over 20 experienced specialist paediatric audiologists and is managed by:
- Kerri Farah – Head of children’s audiology and the newborn hearing screening
- Keiran Joseph – Clinical lead