As part of managing your hearing loss you will have appointments made with an audiologist to test your hearing levels.

The audiologist will plot information about your hearing levels on a chart called an audiogram. Hearing is described and plotted in two ways.

• By the loudness of the sound (dB HL)
• By the pitch of the sound (kHz)

 There are different degrees of hearing loss which are classified as:

• Mild (25-40dB) where you may have difficulties hearing speech in noisy environments or not directly facing someone.
• Moderate (40-70dB) where you might find you have difficulty following speech and other relatively quiet noises.
• Severe (70-90dB) where you will have difficulty following speech in quiet surroundings and not hear general noises unless they are loud.
• Profound (90+dB) where you can't hear most sounds unless very loud.  

Talk to your audiologist to find out more about your hearing levels and what your audiogram means. You can also read more about hearing loss here.