Based on returned surveys from 1,141 experienced hearing aid users and 884 new users, Kochkin et al (2010) reported that "quality control at the point of dispensing has not kept pace with technological improvements…there is great variability in the hearing aid fitting process, and it appears that critical aspects of the fitting protocol are not followed, despite general consensus among all the professional societies…." 

The authors noted the top 10 key mistakes made by dispensing professionals included:

Henry et al (2015) investigated whether typical hearing aid fittings for tinnitus are more effective than hearing aids with built in noise/sound generators. Of note, the authors were unable to find previous investigations that addressed these exact same parameters. Parazzini et al (2011) determined that tinnitus therapy was equally effective with sound generators and open-fit hearing aids and, indeed, the net improvement across the two different sound sources was identical and indistinguishable (see Beck, 2011). 

Leong and Lesser (2015) reported that 880 members of the British Acoustic Neuroma Association were e-mailed a survey of which 480 were returned from people who had been diagnosed and treated for acoustic neuroma, and 465 had complete data, used for analysis. Acoustic neuroma treatment ranged from surgical excision for 47 percent of the respondents, stereotactic radiosurgery was the treatment for 25 percent, some 23 percent  had serial MRIs, and the remaining 5 percent had surgery and stereotactic radiosurgery. 

Birman, Gibson, and Elliott (2015) evaluated post-operative surgical pain in children (ages 16 years and younger), following cochlear implant surgery via assessment of analgesia use. Between August 2010 and November 2012, 98 children were implanted, 61 were reported. Of the 61 children who were reported, 19 children required no pain relief and 42 children used paracetamol (aka acetaminophen in the United States) Additionally, 1 child required oxycodeine for 1 day (following bilateral implant surgery), and codeine phosphate was used by 1 child for 3 days.

Hillock-Dunn et al evaluated 17 children (ages 9 to 17 years) with mild-to-profound sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) with respect to two measures: (1) consonant identification in quiet and (2) spondee identification in noise. The researchers provided the Phonak Naida V SP “laboratory” non-linear frequency compression (NLFC) hearing aid, which allows NLFC to be turned on and off in the same device. Hearing aids were programmed to DSL v 5.0 targets.