Audio & Spiro Course

My name is Anita Bell and I work as an Occupational Health Technician for David Barber Occupational Health. I began working for the company in October 2018. In February/ March I attended a spirometry and audiometry course in Bolton run by P&A medical.

The spirometry course ran over 2 days. Initially, we looked at the lungs, their normal function and how they work and then went on to look at various causes of lung problems and disease, from asthma, COPD, cancer and asbestosis to fibrosis to name a few. We then went on to see how some different occupations can have higher risks of lung affected issues and how employers have to provide a regulatory standard of care to employees with regards to their health and the supply of adequate PPE. We were shown how to read various graphs with possible causes of lung-related illnesses and how they differ to an ordinary graph and whether they were normal, restrictive, obstructive or combined. Test booklets were provided through the course. Learning about the spirometry machine was quite straight forward, from calibration to maintenance and testing. We then looked at how to read results of a spirogram as regards to HSE regulatory percentages for test passes. The exam consisted of a practical test and theory test. The results were in and I passed.

The audiometry course ran over 3 days. We began by learning about the outer and inner ear and the task each individual part in the ear played in our ability to hear. How we are able to hear different frequencies and what parts of the ear help us to hear those frequencies and how they work together to produce what we hear. We also looked into how and why a person could lose their hearing and the causes. From wax, infections, disease, perforations, surgery and work-related injuries. Is it possible that we can regain our hearing and by what methods we are able to do that? Then we went on to learn about the audio machine and what it did and how to use it, maintenance, testing and how to use manually as and when required. Power points were used to show how to interpret the audiogram results and test sheets were provided to demonstrate different scenarios of hearing loss. We then went on to demonstrate how we would explain to a person the test we were going to undertake and what to expect, then explain the results with them. This was done numerous times through the day, so that we felt confident in what we were doing. During the course we would always go back over all the different areas of hearing so that everyone in the group fully understood what we needed to learn. The exam consisted of a theory test and a practical test. The results were in and I passed.