It’s not a “proper” hearing aid, but I thought I’d drop this link here – like many I find conversations in noisy environments increasingly hard to follow, which is of course a PITA at times. Apple has a (relatively) cheap solution, having got FDA approval for using their latest AirPods Pro as a hearing aid
It will be interesting to see if the approval for Apple leads to other providers coming up with new solutions. I think the existing hearing aid market is a bit of a racket (no pun intended). My dad had severe hearing loss, and tried a private provider (after a lack of success with NHS aids). They just kept providing new models for him to trial, which cost thousands of pounds, and didn’t work for him at all.
I discovered Bose were selling a product in the USA called Hearphones, which were marketed as “conversation-enhancing headphones”, not hearing aids, because of the FDA rules on medical device approval. They were basically Bose noise cancelling buds with amplification for incoming sound, and allowed you to tune the noise cancelling zone (e.g. set a narrow zone of amplification for listening to someone directly in front of you, but cut out the ambient sound on either side , which is often a problem if you have hearing loss). We managed to order a set from the USA, and they worked really well for my Dad, out of the box. He was immediately holding a conversation in a way he simply had been unable to do with the other hearing aids. They cost several hundred pounds to ship from the USA, but that was a fraction of the prices we were quoted for the commercial hearing aids.
My dad’s hearing continued to deteriorate, and he eventually got updated NHS aids, which were a big improvement on the earlier ones (as others have mentioned above) but he still continued to switch between the Hearphones and the NHS aids depending on how he was feeling and the situation he was in.
Bose are not manufacturing Hearphones any more, but it sounds like Apple’s new solution is a similar approach, and hopefully others will follow suit. For anyone with hearing problems I would definitely recommend your NHS provider first, and you may well find they will provide something that is just as good as the very expensive private offerings.
