The feasibility of hospital-based universal newborn hearing screening in the United Kingdom

Current hearing screening programmes in the United Kingdom are performing unacceptably poorly. Davies et al. (1997) suggested that universal newborn hearing screening (UNHS) would be more effective and cheaper to run. However, there is concern that hospital-based UNHS would not be feasible because of early postnatal discharge, and thus babies not staying in hospital long enough to be screened. Two studies were designed to determine the viability of hospital-based UNHS in a district general hospital in the United Kingdom. Study 1 retrospectively determined the discharge age and time of discharge of all 3021 well babies born at St Helier hospital, Carshalton, and the number of babies born at home in the area, from 19 October 1997-18 October 1998. Most well babies were found to pass through hospital at a convenient time for predischarge hearing screening, and the optimal protocol was screening from 9 am-2 pm, 7 days a week. The predicted maximal screening coverage was 92.68%. Study 2 tested the calculated optimal protocol over 1 week. It was found that UNHS with otoacoustic emissions on the maternity ward from 9 am-2 pm, 7 days a week, achieved a coverage of 89.06%, with an acceptable false positive rate of 6.2%. It is likely that a similar protocol with slight modifications could be implemented successfully in other hospitals in the United Kingdom.