The government authority that provides hearing devices is rationing access to technology upgrades because its budget cannot meet unprecedented demand for the latest speech processor.
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Australian Hearing funded more than 400 speech processor upgrades for Cochlear implants in the first half of this financial year, almost four times as many as in the corresponding period the previous year.
The surge in demand for upgrades is being attributed to the advanced features of the latest speech processor, called Nucleus 6, as well as an increasing number of children and young adults having both ears implanted.
Australian Hearing operations director Gina Mavrias said in order to manage the increase in requests within its $62 million budget, it had updated its "clinical candidacy criteria" to focus on clients who would gain most benefit from the new processor.
Ms Mavrias said the main benefit of the Nucleus 6 was that it automatically changed programs to manage noise, but these programs could be manually selected on the previous processor, the Nucleus 5. She said for these reasons Australian Hearing was giving priority to clients who could not manually change settings such as young children or people with disability.
The change has created anxiety among the deafness community. Lyndhurst woman Lisa Thomas fears her 8-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son could miss out on the latest processor because of the changes.
"It offers Bluetooth and wireless technologies, it offers better speech sound, it cuts things out like wind noises – things that we don't even think about as hearing people because our own ears do that for us. But the Cochlears don't have the range of sounds that we have, and the newer technology does offer these things, and now they can't even have access to them," Ms Thomas said.
Ms Thomas said if her children were deemed ineligible for upgrades, the family would not be able to pay the cost of $8000 per processor, which would amount to a total cost of $32,000 because both children have both ears implanted.
Shadow parliamentary secretary for health Nick Champion recently wrote to Health Minister Sussan Ley asking her to address Australian Hearing's funding situation.
A spokesman for Assistant Minister for Health Fiona Nash said decisions about allocating funding were the responsibility of Australian Hearing. The spokesman said there had been no cut to the funding the government gave Australian Hearing for such upgrades. "The government is committed to ensuring that all … clients with a cochlear implant have a working cochlear speech processor," he said.
