[The use of the German APHAB for quality control in hearing aid fitting in an ENT-office. Comparison of our results with the given US-norm].

OBJECTIVE: ISO 9001 recommends a customer survey both pre and post hearing aid fitting. A lot of different German questionnaires are in use, but most of them have not been investigated by a large number of patients. The APHAB is well evaluated in the US. We want to compare our APHAB (German) outcome with the US-norm given by the HARL, to be able to answer the question if the German-APHAB can be used for quality control in hearing aid fitting done in a German ENT-office. Furthermore we want to discuss some special aspects of the benefit of the APHAB in quality control of hearing aid fitting.
MATERIAL AND METHODS: We collected the APHAB data of 224 patients in 9 ENT-offices. The scores were measured pre and post fitting. We compared APHAB mean score for EC-, RV-, BN-, and AV-subscale and performed a wider outlook by statistical methods.
RESULTS: We tested the null-hypothesis: "There is no difference between the percentiles given by HARL and ours". All probabilities by using the Wilcoxon rank sum test are greater than 0.025, so we have to accept this with a p < 2.5%. By using the sign test we got a probability of a positive benefit for hearing aid fitting of about 75-78% in the EC-, BN-, RV- and 28% in the AV-subscale (confidence interval 95%).
CONCLUSIONS: The trial shows, that we can well use the German-APHAB for quality control in hearing aid fitting done in an ENT-office. Patients fitted in a German ENT-office score the same as patients fitted by US-audiologists. We will continue using the APHAB forms, analyse the scoring and use it for technical adjustments to increase the coaching for negative scoring patients. © Georg Thieme Verlag KG Stuttgart · New York.