Herald Sun interviews Chief Audiologist Jonathan Galt

Hears to an even clearer future
Herald Sun, Page: 28
Saturday, 24 January 2009
Ref: 46395418


JONATHAN Galt loves seeing new recruits enter his profession, watching them in the same position he was in 30 years ago.

That’s how long the audiologist has been working to improve his patients’ hearing and their lives.

The president of the Victorian branch of the Audiological Society of Australia is also chief audiologist at the privately run National Hearing Care, providing hearing help to private clients and pensioners.

"As a manager what I really love is nurturing new audiologists and developing them into independent practitioners, that’s very rewarding," Galt says.

He began his career with a science degree, an interest in electronics and a desire to help others, so hearing specialist was a natural next step.

"An audiologist is a hearing specialist as distinct from an ear specialist," he says.

"An ear, nose and throat doctor will call themselves an ear specialist, but we specialize in the non-medical aspects of hearing heath care." Among the 1600 practitioners in Australia, specialist areas include: pediatric audiologists providing diagnosis to children and amplification (of sound) to them; electro-physiology, where the audiologist is looking at the response of the cochlear  to acoustic nerve sound and balance; and then those specializing in cochlear implantation, in the pre-operative assessment and post-operative rehabilitation of clients (with implants).

There are now 2000 Victorians with cochlear implants.

An undergraduate degree is a prerequisite for entry to audiology, a course only available at the University of Melbourne, with the most common applicants being those with a science or psychology degree, Galt says.

"A lot of scientists come to audiology and I ask them, Why did you come to it ," he says. "And they answer, I didn’t want to be stuck in a laboratory all my life, I wanted to have that human interaction".  The field is a fast-moving one, Galt says, with new innovations in technology making treatment of hearing problems more effective than ever.

Hearing aids, for example, have come a long way since 20 years ago when "people used to say the main problem was the feedback whistle you got from them and an occlusion effect when you block your ear your own voice sounds a bit different and those problems by and large have been solved by advanced technology", Galt says.

"There ’s invisible open-ear technology by (hearing instrument provider) (GN Re-Sound, the hearing aids are much more fashionable, behind-the-ear hearing aids used to be 20 per cent of the market and now are 90 per cent of the market.

"They can match your hair, they can be colorful and they’re automatic, the volume will adjust automatically, they will detect (background) noise and suppress it."

Hearing aid: Victorian Audiological Society of Australia president Jonathan Galt says the field moves fast. Picture: BELINDA O ’NEILL INTERESTED? Audiologist Jonathan Galt says his profession is growing and graduates must increase to cope with the aging population.

There is a big need for more health professionals and there’s what I call the 70-70 rule in our field," he says.

Seventy per cent of people in their 70s need a hearing aid, and because the aging population is ballooning the need for audiologists to care for those people will be increased." Of the 100 or so who apply each year to enter audiology at the University of Melbourne, only 30 are selected and barely 120 audiologists graduate each year across the country.

Seventy per cent of audiologists are female," Gait says. Because they go off to have their children, a lot are part-time. It ’s a very good profession for women because it lends itself to nine-to-five work and working part-time, and because health care professions are generally in short supply the remuneration for audiologists is quite attractive." Graduates can expect to begin on around $55,000 a year.

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