Hearing Therapy with Bunty Levene

Bunty Levene has recently joined the team to provide a therapy service for Cubex patients. Since qualifying as a Lip-reading teacher and Hearing Therapist in 1979, Bunty has worked at St. George's and Charing Cross Hospital, and most recently The City Lit Centre for the Deaf in London. She is now freelancing working as a locum for the South Buckinghamshire NHS Trust. Hospital. Her other activities are running two lip reading and communication skills classes in North London, and acting as a personal tutor to students on the hearing Therapy Course in Bristol University where she also teaches on Group therapy and stress management.

"The first experience I had of living with deafness was with my deaf grandparents who both lost most of their hearing just before they met each other, " says Bunty. "I recognised that, with a change of communication on my part, their ability to understand speech increased enormously. It was a skill that was a natural part of my growing up. Since then I have always empathised with people who are unable to hear well and this motivated me to become a hearing therapist."

Bunty is in attendance at Cubex Hearing Centre one Friday each month. Her role will include the following:

• Counselling and practical advice about communication tactics.
  
• Lip-reading training and raised awareness of visual clues as an aid to speech discrimination.
• Auditory training which assists with speech recognition .
• Stress management in difficult situations
• Advice about the latest technical equipment which will often work in conjunction with a hearing aid, helping to hear television better and on the telephone.
• Tinnitus counselling and retraining to help overcome the effects of head noises.