Welcome back! We trust everyone had a restful, enjoyable break. We were pleased to welcome a new year, and are looking forward to seeing you all in our clinics soon.

We are grateful to everyone who filled in our customer feedback survey last year. You told us we’re a friendly team, and you’re getting good service from our clinicians. Your suggestions are top of the agenda for our next staff customer-service workshop. 

Congratulations to Diane Parata, who won the Christmas hamper draw, and also to Vivienne Mountney who made the closest guess in Invercargill clinic’s competition to guess the number of batteries.

World Hearing Day was on 3 March. The day’s theme was Hearing Care for All! Screen. Rehabilitate. Communicate. Everyone is entitled to good hearing, and the day aimed to raise everybody’s awareness—individuals and institutions alike—to the need to take action on hearing loss and ear diseases throughout our life spans.

Monitoring your hearing throughout life is so important. As an individual, a good first step is to make sure you hear well and your ears are healthy, and to mark the day, we started with the first step — Screen. 

For the week of 1–5 March, Audiology South clinics donated 100% of the fees for hearing tests to the National Foundation for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, the voice of deaf and hearing impaired people in New Zealand. 

We hope you will take advantage of our super opportunity to test-drive Paradise™ hearing aids with our 14-day, obligation-free trial. This opportunity will run through to 30 April 2021.

Perhaps your hearing tests return normal results, but you still find it difficult to hear in groups or noisy restaurants. This is known as hidden hearing loss. We have an article about it in the newsletter, so if this is your experience talk with your audiologist.

And finally, Simon Melville and I recently went to the launch of More™, a hearing aid with built-in artificial intelligence called Deep Neural Networking, and we provide more information about this device and what it offers in the newsletter.