Hearing Link

‘Your homelife, your hearing’ offers practical tips and solutions to help make homelife with hearing loss a little bit easier. We have FREE sessions on the following dates in 2025 (please note content is the same for each session): Wednesday 29 October, 2-3pm Wednesday 26 November, 12-1pm Friday 12 December, 4-5pm ‘Your homelife, your hearing’ was created by a team of peer support volunteers who have personal experience of deafness or a change in their hearing.

The next title in the Helpful Hours series will consider how having hearing loss affects living well at home. As per our current webinars, the session will be solutions focused and will include helpful tips and strategies, as well as information on the devices and smart technology that can support you across your day. Since their launch Helpful Hours have helped over 500 people learn how they can get the best out of their audiology and medical appointments.

Applications are now open for individuals and organisations play a part in designing the new National Care Service (NCS) for Scotland. Adults over the age of 18 can apply on gov.scot to join the Lived Experience Experts Panel (LEEP) which will bring together all sorts of people from across the country to share their views on how the new NCS can best meet the needs of those it will serve. Stakeholder organisations can also add their voices by applying to join the Stakeholder Register.

Hi, I’m Lorna, the new Head of Service Engagement at Hearing Dogs. I lead on Service Engagement that sits within our newly formed Service Design and Delivery team. My career in the hearing loss sector started in 2013 when I joined Hearing Link. I admit I came with little experience of hearing loss and only brief knowledge of the charity. However, I soon realised how wonderful the charity, its services and volunteer community were, and over time built up my knowledge and understanding of the sector.

At Hearing Dogs for Deaf People, we believe all of our services (hearing dogs and Hearing Link Services) are stronger when they’re shaped by the people who use and deliver them. Your lived experience with hearing loss is invaluable, and we want to understand what works, what doesn’t, and what could be better. That’s why we want to involve you, our Peer Support Volunteers, in co-creation to work together to develop and improve our services and support.

By Nicholas Orpin Welcome to July’s update on our service delivery. With many Peer Support Volunteers already on their holidays, a continued ‘thank you’ to everyone still engaged in delivering and developing the services. Do enjoy any down time too, recharge and reset for the rest of the summer! Across our five July drop-ins, 12 volunteers helped 40 people directly while volunteering over 35 hours of time.

Our Helpful Hours sessions offer practical tips and friendly advice from people who understand. Led by trained volunteers with personal experience of hearing loss and deafness, each session is designed to help you manage the most common challenges people tell us they face. We currently offer two different free sessions.

We have begun working with our Helpful Hours volunteer team to develop the next topic in our webinar series. Initial discussions between the group have identified the next topic which focuses on living well at home. Thinking around the new webinar was helped also by statistics and anecdotal lived experience of how people with hearing loss felt managing hearing loss at home.

Our fabulous colleagues from the IT department at Hearing Dogs have kindly offered to run online training sessions for our Peer Support Volunteers. If you are struggling to get the best out of Teams, or would like to know more about using Viva Engage to communicate with other Hearing Dogs volunteers, we would love to know. All we ask is you complete our short survey and let us know which topics interest you.

A charity volunteer has been awarded a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2025 King’s Birthday Honours for her services to the deaf and hearing-impaired community in the county. Merleen Watson, a longstanding volunteer for our charity Hearing Dogs for Deaf People, which trains life-changing assistance dogs and provides emotional and practical support services to people with hearing loss, received the honour in the King’s Birthday Honours list in June.