Scottish audiology services brought up to date

The sites are: Crosshouse Hospital in Kilmarnock for NHS Ayrshire & Arran; Prince’s Gate in Hamilton for Lanarkshire Primary Care NHS Trust; Gilbert Bain Hospital in Lerwick, Shetland; Peterhead Community Hospital for NHS Grampian, and Aboyne and Inverurie hospitals and Buckie’s Seafield hospital – these latter four projects all share a similar profile. The new state-of-the-art audiology unit at Crosshouse Hospital is the flagship project among all these undertaken by IAC. Taking just six months to complete, it was actually the first in the entire modernisation programme and comprised £220,000 worth of improvements carried out in two stages. Firstly, four purpose-built test rooms were built that included a hi-tech paediatric test facility. Next came comprehensive refurbishment and expansion of its existing poor accommodation into a high-grade suite of acoustically-treated consulting rooms, each with integral, individual air conditioning systems. Adrian Carragher, long involved with the British Association of Audiological Technicians, is head of audiology services at the Trust. At the time of opening the facility he said: “At the heart of this redevelopment was the need to build modern, fit-for-purpose facilities to allow the department to deliver a modern and continually modernising service to patients.”