Elwick church helps members with hearing loss
A new audio system in a church in Elwick, County Durham is expected to provide benefits to churchgoers who use hearing aids, like the kind available from www.amplifon.co.uk. The audio-frequency induction loop system at St Peter’s Church will also be used to project the voices of pupils from the nearby primary school, who regularly use the church, the Hartlepool Mail reports.
The £2,000 needed to install the audio system was raised through a variety of fundraising efforts, including raffles, coffee mornings and even a name-the-teddy competition, while the Benevolent Committee of Durham Freemasons also donated £500.
An audio-frequency industry loop system is a wire-free way to transmit sound to listeners with a hearing aid or suitable receiver, clearly and without any distracting noise.
“The system will make a huge difference to people, like myself, who use a hearing aid,” Ron Gray, church treasurer, told the newspaper.
“The church in Hart and several other churches have this system in place and it has proved extremely successful.”
An earlier article in Hartlepool Today suggested that nearly one in six people in the town have some form of hearing loss, based on official figures from the local authority, adding up to nearly 15,000 people in all.