Audiology in Australia

This post is by Peggy, especially for all my audiologist friends out there.

When we decided to move to Australia I was excited about the possibility of working in another country. The Australian system for educating audiologists was patterned after the US system. I have filled out all kinds of paperwork and I have to take the praxis exam that they give all the graduating audiologists. !!!! They give the exam only twice a year. I should be able to take it in April, but I don’t know where it will be given yet. Even though audiologists are in short supply (there are only about a thousand in the entire county) they have a rigorous entry system.

In the meantime I am working on a “temporary” basis. When we came for the interview I talked with the audiologist in charge of the Northern Territory Hearing Services, which is under the Department of Health and Community Services. (Socialized medicine here, much like Canada.) She offered me a job as soon as I had approval on my application to the Audiological Society of Australia. I started working two weeks after I arrived. I’m only working 3 days a week and only traveling to aboriginal communities where the plane flies out of Nhulunbuy. (More on the aborigines in a minute.)

Audiology is rather fragmented in Australia. The different state governments provide diagnostics free of charge to everyone. Hearing aids, on the other hand, are provided for children and some older adults by a federal agency, Australian Hearing. Private practice audiologists provide hearing aids for everyone else and do the industrial work. There is one audiology private practice in the entire Northern Territory, in Darwin. My impression is that often the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. There seems to be some disconnect between diagnosis (hearing test) and treatment (hearing aid), at least out here in the bush.

About half of my job will be testing patients here in Nhulunbuy in the clinic and for the ENT’s who come to town four times a week. The other half of my job will be traveling by small charter plane to aboriginal communities to do testing. I have already made one trip with the audiometrist from Darwin. Most of the aboriginal communities have only some running water, and only some electrical power. They are truly third world. In this remote area, there are many aborigines who finish “school” with only a limited grasp of English. The rate of otitis media among the aborigines is among the highest in the world. I think I saw more perforated eardrums in one trip to the bush than I’ve seen in 30 years as an audiologist.

The up side to the trips to the bush is that I am seeing a side of Australia that few people get to see. And I get to fly in small planes! ☺ Australia is definitely a huge and sparely populated country.