Hearing Help Derbys 01-05-2024

Cheryl Crove it makes you happy taking us into the zone for this Wednesday evening. A very good evening to you. It is, as they say, a packed program tonight starting after the outbreak with Jane Birkin of Hearing Help Derbyshire who will be chatting about their services and well in general about Hearing Help Derbyshire and what they can offer you and what you can offer them more to the point. The Facebook and Instagram posts are up so you can avail yourself of any details and if you're not able to look at either of those then Jane will be going into detail after the outbreak. Coldplay there and Speed of Sound. I was looking for an appropriate track to play to introduce Jane Birkin from Hearing Help Derbyshire. That was the the least inappropriate track I could find. Jane welcome to you. Thank you. Thank you for inviting us Trevor. We met at the CVS event. We did yes. Amber Valley CVS and David Brough organised some events at the local sports pavilion down the road. Lots of voluntary organisations were there. I gave a quick talk on what Community Radio was, what we could do for for you guys and lots of people said we want to be on Amber Sound which is great which is what the point was. So I've interviewed people from Hearing Help before back at the old studios. I think there's been a little bit of a change of personnel so I think it would be appropriate to well find out what Hearing Help Derbyshire is. Tell us about the organisation. Well first of all thank you for inviting us. We're absolutely excited to be here. It's not very often we get opportunity to promote ourselves. We do the best we can. We cover the whole of Derbyshire. So we go all around Derbyshire trying to promote our service. Because a lot of what we do is about supporting people and making sure they're not isolated. 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But we do run a number of things from our centre, such as a monthly social group, which is on the third Wednesday of the month, and that is where people can come along and they can be a member, and they can have some lunch, we have a visiting speaker, a quiz, and it's all very upbeat, sometimes we have somebody to do some entertainment, and we do that from 12 to 2, so they can come along to that, as long as we know they're coming and we can cater for them, everybody is welcome. So if you're a hearing aid user, that's primarily what it's for, so they don't feel isolated from the community, they can bring a family member along if they want to, everybody is welcome at Hearing Help. Two or three times during the interview you've used the word isolation, and that is an important consideration. So many of the groups I interview on here, they are there to prevent social isolation, that is one of their primary functions, no matter what the group is, that it's gathering together of like-minded or like people, people who are experiencing the same thing and can share their experiences and feel less isolated in that way, I think that's a really important function of all the voluntary organisations I interview. So you said you have a social afternoon, what afternoon is that? It's on the third Wednesday of the month, every month, from 12 o'clock to 2 o'clock, and you can check the dates by either ringing us up, or we usually promote them on Facebook and X. The next one will be on the 19th of June, so if anybody was interested in that, they can give us a call and book a place. Tell us about an average day in your life at Hearing Help Derbyshire. So an average day in my life, because I'm an outreach consultant, is that I will get up and go to work, sometimes I'll go into the office, answer phone calls, take referrals from people, answer the door, talk to people who are coming in for earwax appointments, but mostly I'm out in the community, similar to the event that we met at the CCS, we do markets, we do events, we do talks, we go all around the county, we have a pop-up store that we can pop up, and just basically going anywhere where people ask us to go, or going into the areas where we know we might not reach people quite so easily, being based in Amber Valley. So one of the other ways that we do that is to go out into different areas, and we run quite a lot of peer support groups in different areas. We have one in Olferton this morning, so that was my morning this morning, a peer support group in Olferton, we have one starting very soon in Matlock, we have one in Long Eaton, Swaddling Cove, Buxton, Chesterfield, and we're looking to set one up in Ilkeston later this year. So they are really, really important when you go back to the isolation issue. It's really good to be with like-minded people, it's good for their mental health, it improves their well-being, like you say they can share their experience, they can meet other role models, discuss their problems, problem solve together, and we're just really there to facilitate that, and you know they can draw on their own life experiences and connect with other people. Okay, let's take a break there, we have to have an ad break, so we'll take the ad break, have a piece of music, and we'll come back and talk a little more about how Hearing Help Derbyshire helps people with hearing loss, and how people can get involved, because that's another important thing, getting people to come forward, get involved, maybe volunteer. So let's have Jason Derulo and an ad break, and we'll come back with Jane Berkey from Hearing Help Derbyshire in a few minutes. Jason Derulo announcing to take us up to the ad break on The Zone on 107.2 and 98.4 FM, Amber Sound FM. This evening's guest is Jane Berkey of Hearing Help Derbyshire, and during that song she said, oh I have a particular favourite song, so I said, I'll put it in the playlist, but you can introduce it. So Jane, over to you, what's coming up after the ad break? Well, I always feel very happy when I hear this song, because it makes me want to dance, and it's a very positive song, and it is Dancing in the Moonlight by Top Loader. And that's after the ad break. Top Loader, Dancing in the Moonlight, the choice of our guest this evening, Jane Berkey of Hearing Help Derbyshire. Welcome back, Jane. Thank you, I really enjoyed that. You were boogieing, you did a bit of chair boogieing, weren't you? You said it was like being back at the Regal Witch Show. Absolutely, yeah. Back in the day, when we all used to hang around Ripley on a Friday night. But the less of the better. Let's say some more about Hearing Help Derbyshire. Now we left off talking about consultations and referrals. Do people have to have a formal referral from a GP or whatever? If so, how do they go about that? Okay, well, the answer to that is they don't have to have a formal consultation or referral. People just simply need to get in touch with us, or someone they trust to get in touch with us. They can refer themselves, an organisation can refer them, a member of their family can refer them, and they can use our email contact or our phone number or drop in and see us. The only criteria is they need to be a hearing aid user, and they have to be over 18 and live in Derbyshire, excluding the city. And we're very, very fortunate at Hearing Help that our partners at Derbyshire County Council and the NHS, who we work alongside, are very committed to supporting hard of hearing people in Derbyshire because of some of the factors that we mentioned earlier. This is really important to us, and that helps us to provide quite a lot of equipment to help people along. So they can get in touch with us and have a free assessment. We'll have a chat to them. If they're not actually using a hearing aid but they're struggling with a hearing, please still get in touch with us because we can signpost, give advice, and help anybody really. We'll help anybody with anything. We do a lot of signposting. And the referral can be done face to face if we're out and about and somebody bumps into one of us at one of our outreach events, or it can be done over the phone. And basically we're going to just ask the basic questions. It's not means tested or anything like that. We're not prying into their private financial affairs or anything like that. And a lot of the equipment that we're able to provide because of our links with the council, etc., can be free of charge. It depends on the circumstances, but there is a lot of equipment they can have free of charge if they're eligible. So the answer is get in touch with us whatever way you like. Whoever can help you, get in touch with us and we'll help them. And it's a simple form. It takes about five minutes to fill out. And we just want the name, address, date of birth, how long they've had the hearing aids, and that type of thing. And then what happens is if they do have any equipment, if we assess them as being eligible for equipment, the equipment will be delivered to their home, set up by an independent organisation that we work alongside called MediQuip. And they set it all up for them. And then we get in touch with them a few weeks later and say, How are you getting on with the equipment? Is it working for you? Do you need anything else? What kind of equipment are we talking about here? Okay, so there's lots of equipment you can get, but the free pieces of equipment, the first one is something to help with the TV. It's called a TV listener and it enables them to listen to the TV through a headphone or through a loop of the hearing aids. And the family members can have the TV turned right down to their volume and they can listen to it to the heart content through the hearing aid. Because we get a lot of fallouts and arguments in families about the telly being too loud or some people worry the telly's too loud and they're going to disturb the neighbours. We have a doorbell, which is portable. It's got lots of different ring tones on it and things and it's portable so they can take it down the garden with them and it'll flash and ring when the doorbell rings. There's also an extension they can get that tells them when the alarm line is ringing. And then we have a couple of what we call personal listeners. These are pieces of equipment, a bit like a mobile phone size, that they can take out and about with them. People have them to listen to church sermons or to meet with their friends for a coffee and just help their hearing environment a little bit. One has got dexterous buttons on it so if you're struggling with your hands it's got big buttons on and the other one is very, very similar. And then we have a portable flashing, ringing and vibrating alarm clock. But on top of that there are lots of pieces of equipment. We can signpost them to different organisations if they're struggling with telephones or anything else and we can provide them with names and addresses and phone numbers for other organisations that may be able to help them. Again, signposting according to their needs. So that's pretty much the equipment that we do. And you were talking about some of the services you offer. Let's recap those so that people know what they can avail themselves of if they need to. Okay, yes. Well the one thing we haven't talked about very much, I did briefly mention at the beginning, is our ear waxing service. We have a trained and qualified nurse who comes into the office every so often and you can book an appointment for ear wax removal and we specialise in that. And we find that lots of people struggle with build-up of ear wax. And it's a friendly professional service and our nurse also offers a blood pressure check and a free sugar glucose check at the same time. This is something that's not offered at many GP practices these days. It used to be that if you had a build-up of ear wax after a cold or something like that, you would go along, book an appointment with the practice nurse and have your ear syringed out. These days that's being offered less and less. So people are having to go to private audiologists. So that's a vital service in itself. Yes, it is. It's quite difficult for people to do it. And if people are really, really struggling, we can, in some areas, offer home visits for that. My husband had his done last week because I told him that he couldn't hear me. And he told me everything's too loud now. So it definitely worked for him. So it's something we'd like people to promote. We'd like to promote that. If people want to do it, just get in touch with us and we'll book them in for an appointment. But there is a charge for that service because obviously there's equipment and we have the nurse come in to do that. Again, just to recap, we have our monthly peer support groups in all the areas I suggested before. And we have our social. We are a charity and people help us a lot financially. We often get donations from bereavements and things like that. Some of our service users that have come to us for many years really love coming to our building. And they often remember us. And that's how we're able to help others. And the peer support groups we've got running at the moment, we're able to buy a cup of coffee and a cake because that is funded purely from a bereavement donation that we had from a lady that was an ex-service user who lived in Chesterfield. So that's really, really nice to carry on that legacy for people. Something they believed in and something they got support from. And we're able to carry on supporting people because they believed in our service. So in summary then, anyone who's a hearing aid user or feels they might need hearing aids, get in touch with Hearing Help Derbyshire. Get in touch with you on the phone number that's on our Facebook page and our Instagram page. And there are more details there. I've posted details of the earwax removal clinics and so on and so forth. So what I haven't done is post the locations of the social groups. So I shall add those to the post a little later. So anyone who's wondering how to get in touch, do please look at our Facebook and Instagram pages. You don't have to be actually on Facebook to look at the Facebook post. You don't have to join Facebook. It's a public post. Facebook.com slash AmberSoundFM and Instagram.com slash AmberSoundFM. Jane Birkin, I think we'd better wrap up there. But see, you've been very helpful today and very informative and, well, very friendly as well. So if anyone does feel the need to get in touch with Hearing Help Derbyshire, do please get in touch with Jane and her colleagues. And I'm sure they'd be more than happy to help you. Jane, thank you. Thank you very much. And I'd just like to thank everybody that supports us in the area and in Derbyshire for everything they do for us. Our wonderful volunteers and it's a pleasure to work with Derbyshire people. They teach us something every day and we, you know, we can help them. And please, please get in touch. If you're struggling at all or if you know anybody else that is, we, you know, we're happy to help you. Jane Birkin, it's been a pleasure. Thank you, it's a pleasure too. Thank you. Pleased with my heavy breathing all over the end of me hour. Thanks once again to Jane Birkin from Hearing Help Derbyshire for coming in and talking about their services. You can, as I say, see more about them on our Facebook and Instagram pages for today. Do take a look at that. Make a note of any phone numbers. Pass those phone numbers on to...