Community engagement and intelligence - a focus on hearing loss

During August 2017 Healthwatch Middlesbrough and Healthwatch Redcar and Cleveland received information from Middlesbrough Deaf Centre, highlighting issues affecting some of their service users in accessing various health and social care services.

To determine the impact on service users Healthwatch held a community engagement event on 1 November 2017 at the Middlesbrough Deaf Centre to give people an opportunity to share their experiences of all local health and social care services. The Deaf Centre promoted the event and CJ Interpreting Services supported Healthwatch on the day and created a BSL video informing service users about the event, which was shared within the deaf community. A total of 22 people attended the event from South Tees (Middlesbrough and Redcar & Cleveland), and were keen to share their experiences on a wide range of topics.

The key issues raised were; service users lacked awareness of their rights under the Accessible Information Standard, there was a lack of implementation of Accessible Information Standard by NHS providers and Social Care Services, a lack of emergency provision of interpreting services, e.g. emergency doctor appointments and A&E, and a lack of deaf awareness with health professionals, for e.g. requesting patients to write things down or expecting family members to support them in appointments. There were also concerns over interpreting agencies employing British Sign Language interpreters who are not registered and there were no opportunities for deaf people to give feedback or make a complaint as they were not in an accessible format.

There are no recommendation or formal response from the provider within the report.