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NICE guidance: Cochlear implants for children and adults with severe to profound deafness

The NICE final guidance has been published today. See https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/TA566/chapter/1-Recommendations 
 
There is one important change from the draft in that they have included a measure at 3000Hz which was in the Action Groups recommendations but had been omitted from the draft recommendations. 
 
The lowering of the criteria from 90DBHL to 80 DBHL at more frequencies will mean that more children will qualify for a Cochlear Implant than before. 
 
The changed guidance is below. 
 

For the purposes of this guidance, severe to profound deafness is defined as hearing only sounds that are louder than 80 dB HL (pure-tone audiometric threshold equal to or greater than 80 dB HL) at 2 or more frequencies (500 Hz, 1,000 Hz, 2,000 Hz, 3,000 Hz and 4,000 Hz) bilaterally without acoustic hearing aids. Adequate benefit from acoustic hearing aids is defined for this guidance as:

  • for adults, a phoneme score of 50% or greater on the Arthur Boothroyd word test presented at 70 dBA

  • for children, speech, language and listening skills appropriate to age, developmental stage and cognitive ability. [2009, amended 2018]

NHS England has three months to implement the guidelines from the date of publication of the guidance.