The people who share our lives are our most underused hearing tool—yet they often get no real coaching.
When I leave my audiologist’s office with newly adjusted hearing aids, I feel cared for—the fit checked, my questions answered, the follow-up booked. But the conversations that decide whether those devices stay in my ears or land in a drawer happen elsewhere: at my dinner table, in the car, across a noisy restaurant. In almost every one, there’s another person my audiologist never met and never coached.
That person—a spouse, a sibling, a coworker—spends far more time with my hearing loss than any clinician will. Whether they become an ally or an obstacle often depends on whether anyone taught them how to help. Usually, no one did. It’s a gap audiologists can help close, often in just a few intentional minutes.
Hearing Loss Is Not a Solo Condition
My hearing loss doesn’t impact only me. It reshapes how my husband and I talk, where we sit, whether we go to the party at all. Researchers call this third-party disability: the activity limitations and participation restrictions a person’s hearing loss creates for those closest to them.
Spouses measurably experience it, and how heavily it lands depends on the state of the relationship and how the partner feels about the loss. I’ve seen it firsthand—the person who stops sharing the small things because repeating them feels like too much work.
If a household lives with hearing loss together, a plan built around the patient alone treats only half of it. That’s the premise of family-centered care, which argues that communication partners aren’t spectators to treatment; they’re part of it. But most appointments are still built for one patient and one device, with the partner—if they came at all—an afterthought.
Why the Partner Gets Left Out
It isn’t that audiologists don’t know the people around us matter. It’s that the appointment quietly crowds them out. Time is short, and the work in front of them is concrete and pressing. In initial consultations, the audiologist tends to discuss technical things like the cause of the loss, the devices, and the audiogram.
And if patient-centered care becomes synonymous with focusing on the patient alone, turning to anyone else in the room can feel almost rude. So, the partner gets a warm hello but is left with no real job to do.
The cost is the frustration that sends devices to the nightstand drawer. When I say, “I can hear you, but I can’t understand you,” a partner who was never let in on what that means hears inattention, stubbornness, or not caring enough to try. The one who understands is patient; the one who doesn’t becomes one more reason to give up on the hearing aids.
What It Looks Like to Bring Them In
Bringing the partner in doesn’t take a longer appointment or new forms—just a few concrete things to hand them. Talk to them directly, not through the patient, and share a few communication best practices they can use right away.
- Get our attention first. A touch or eye contact before speaking beats calling from another room. Missing the first few words leaves us playing catch-up from the start.
- Clear beats loud. Shouting and over-enunciating both make us harder to understand; a normal pace with a visible face does more than volume.
- Rephrase, don’t repeat. The same words rarely land the second time; fresh phrasing gives us a new way in.
- Fix the environment. Lower the noise, light the speaker’s face, choose the quieter table—all within a partner’s control.
- Retire “never mind.” “Never mind” and “it wasn’t important” are dismissive and hurtful. Ask partners to finish the thought instead. It’s a small change that means a lot.
The Handoff
How does this fit into a typical appointment?
Name the partner’s role out loud: “You’re going to be an important part of how this works at home.” Share one or two tips from the list above—not all five. Pick the ones that fit each couple and make them concrete: “Get their attention before you speak—a light touch, their name—and wait until they’re looking at you.”
Put the information somewhere it survives the drive home. Include a line in the after-visit summary, use a handout, or recommend a short video to watch together. And give a reason to come back, because family-centered habits build over repeat visits, not one fitting.
When the partner doesn’t come—which is often—the coaching shouldn’t disappear. Ask us about our communication partners and suggest we bring an important one to the next appointment. Or, at a minimum, send the material home so the communication partner can review it on their own.
Bottom Line
Your patient is never the only one in the room. Hearing loss is treated one ear at a time, but it is lived one conversation at a time. Until we coach both people in that conversation, we’re only coaching half of it.
Shari Eberts is a passionate hearing health advocate and internationally recognized author and speaker on hearing loss issues. She is the founder of Living with Hearing Loss, a popular blog and online community for people with hearing loss, and an executive producer of We Hear You, an award-winning documentary about the hearing loss experience. Her book, Hear & Beyond: Live Skillfully with Hearing Loss, (co-authored with Gael Hannan) is the ultimate survival guide to living well with hearing loss. Shari has an adult-onset genetic hearing loss and hopes that by sharing her story, she will help others to live more peacefully with their own hearing issues. Connect with Shari: Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter.
