There are over 87 000 Deaf people in the UK with British Sign Language (BSL) as their first language.1 Few healthcare professionals receive training in Deaf awareness or in BSL, and missed diagnoses and inadequate treatment of Deaf patients are estimated to cost the National Health Service £30 million per year.2 Neurologists are likely to encounter Deaf BSL users in their practice, but without prior experience may find consultations challenging, especially within the time constraints and pressure of a standard clinic. In this article, we provide guidance on consulting with Deaf people in a neurology clinic, drawing on experience from our cognitive clinic for Deaf BSL users where effective communication is essential.
There are significant health inequalities between Deaf and hearing people, including barriers to accessing care and communication difficulties in consultations. Such problems have particularly affected Deaf people with acquired cognitive deficits, leading to late and missed diagnoses. We therefore established a specialist cognitive clinic for the Deaf community in 2011 at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, which to our knowledge is the first of its kind in the world. In this study, we retrospectively analysed electronic patient records to evaluate the service and its impact since inception. We found that Deaf patients who use British sign language had difficulty obtaining an accurate diagnosis before attending our specialist clinic, highlighting the importance of tailored services for Deaf people. Our results show that the clinic improved communication for patients and accessibility to specialist investigations, ensuring diagnostic accuracy and overall reducing health inequality for this population.
The past few years has seen much amalgamation of colleges of nursing and midwifery, and the integration of these colleges into higher education. The resulting changes have often meant an increase in the numbers of nursing students at an institution, and an increase in the amount of lecturers' time spent in the classroom. It could be argued that education has become more resource intensive, and that open and distance learning methods are increasingly being considered. This article considers an educational resource accessed via electronic means- the Campus 2000 network. Part of this network is maintained by the English National Board for Nursing, Midwifery and Health Visiting (ENB) and is known as ENB Campus.
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