3 Questions to Ask About Hearing Aid Repairs

When your hearing aid needs to be repaired, it can feel surprisingly worrying. However, be assured that this feeling is entirely natural. After all, you rely on your hearing aid to allow you to enjoy the full range of your senses— anyone would feel nervous about the prospect of a repair under those circumstances.

To try and make the repair process as easy on you as possible, here are three questions you’ll want to ask your hearing health provider when considering allowing your hearing aid to be repaired.

How long is this going to take?

This is, perhaps, the single most important question you must ask when faced with requiring a hearing aid repair. If you don’t have a spare, then you’re going to need to be able to make plans to cope without your hearing aid during the repair process, and you’ll need to know how long you will have to manage without your device for.

However, it is worth noting that all repairs are unique, and the best that your hearing health professional can tell you is their best estimate. It is therefore advisable, when planning, to add a couple of days onto the estimated timescale you are told, so you can have plans in place to cope if there is a delay.

Is a repair the right choice for this issue?

If you ask your hearing specialist to repair your hearing aid, they will likely do just that. However, before you reach that stage, it’s worth asking if a repair is actually the right choice.

Hearing aids are not designed to last forever; they’re simply too technical to be able to offer a lifetime guarantee. Most hearing aids will last between three to five years. If your hearing aid is nearing these ages, then it’s definitely worth asking if repair is actually the right decision. You may find that your hearing health professional would actually recommend a replacement for an older device, or in circumstances when the repair is expected to be particularly lengthy or expensive.

Is there anything I can do to prevent this kind of repair being necessary in the future?

Maintaining and looking after your hearing aid is something that everyone who uses such a device should take seriously, but accidents do happen. Even the best-maintained hearing aids will experience issues, sometimes due to problems that you didn’t even know you needed to anticipate.

It is therefore worth asking if there is anything that you can do to prevent such a situation from developing in the future. There may not be a definitive answer on this as random accidents and malfunctions can and do happen. However, if there is a way of preventing a repair in the future, you’re going to want to know about it.

While your hearing aid being repaired may lead to a fraught period, taking the time to ask the questions above should help to ease your mind. With any luck, the repair will be simple, and you’ll be reunited with the device you rely on before you know it.