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The UK Council on Deafness created Deaf Awareness Week to increase the visibility of challenges the deaf community face and educate others on how they can support them. Patient Safety Learning has pulled together 9 useful resources shared on the hub to help healthcare professionals, friends and family communicate and support people with hearing loss or deafness. 1 Royal College of General Practitioners: Deafness and hearing loss toolkit This educational kit, developed by Royal College of GPs (RCGP) in collaboration with RNID and NHS England, aims to support GPs to consult effectively with deaf patients by offering tips on how to communicate during face to face and remote appointments. It offers guidelines on how to recognise early symptoms of hearing loss and how to refer patients for a hearing assessment. 2 Communicating with patients with hearing loss or deafness—Can you hear me? The authors of this JAMA article describe the experience of a family member who was in critical care, and who is deaf. They outline a lack of awareness amongst healthcare professionals about their relative's deafness and highlight the lack of understanding in how to communicate with her. They go on to outline a number of approaches to communicating with patients who are deaf or hard of hearing. 3 Inequalities and unreasonable adjustments: are D/deaf women being given a detrimental care pathway in the name of risk assessment? In this article, published in The Practising Midwife, Rachel Crowe argues that in the UK, pregnant women who are hearing impaired or D/deaf (sign language users) and deaf (who are hard of hearing but who have English as their first language and may lipread and/or use hearing aids) are often labelled as high risk and offered a care pathway that is unsuitable and detrimental to their care. This article provides an overview to the needs of D/deaf birthing people with a number of recommendations and tools for use in clinical practice. 4 Blog - 12 tips for communicating with deaf patients Communication barriers are the number one reason deaf people have poorer health compared to hearing people. This blog by the organisation SignHealth gives 12 tips for healthcare workers and non-clinical staff on how to communicate with deaf people. It also describes the difficulties deaf people face when booking appointments and describes why remote consultations are problematic for deaf people. 5 CardMedic: Empowering staff and patients to communicate across any barrier In this interview, anaesthetist Rachael Grimaldi tells us about CardMedic, the organisation she founded to empower staff and patients to communicate across any barrier. Rachael explains how their tools can be used to support vulnerable groups and reduce inequalities. 6 Accessible and inclusive communication within primary care: What matters to people with diverse communication needs The primary care team have an important role in making people feel welcomed, listened to and taken seriously. Yet we often hear examples about people who have not had their communication needs met within primary care. This includes people with sensory impairments. This report from National Voices sets out the key issues faced by people with specific communication needs within primary care and what they feel would make the biggest difference, as well as key actions primary care leaders and teams can take to support inclusive communication. 7 Independent Review of Audiology Services in Scotland In January 2022 the Scottish Government asked for an independent review of the audiology services in Scotland in the context of failings in the standards of care provided in the NHS Lothian Paediatrics Services and made a series of recommendations. 8 The Safety Gap: Safety and accessibility of medicines and medical devices for people with sensory impairment This report for the Patient Safety Commissioner for England, commissioned from Professor Margaret Watson, highlights serious gaps and deficiencies in the way that people with visual and/or hearing impairment or loss (referred to as sensory impairment) are able to access and use medicines and medical devices safely. The report presents the results of a short-term study to explore the challenges experienced by patients with sensory impairment in relation to their safe and effective access to and use of medicines and medical devices and offers a number of recommendations. 9 Kingdon review: terms of reference Dr Camilla Kingdon has been appointed by the Secretary of State to chair an independent review of children's hearing services. The review will consider NHS England’s response to the service failures in paediatric audiology; how the relevant governance arrangements between NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care could be improved and identify lessons learned; and how NHS England’s handling of any future service failures in similar services could be improved and identify lessons learned. Do you have a resource you'd like to share? We’d love to hear about it - leave a comment below or join the hub to share your own post.

Patients with vision or hearing loss frequently encounter difficulties accessing vital health information, medication instructions, and effectively using medical devices. This report for the Patient Safety Commissioner for England, commissioned from Professor Margaret Watson, highlights serious gaps and deficiencies in the way that people with visual and/or hearing impairment or loss (referred to as sensory impairment) are able to access and use medicines and medical devices safely. This report presents the results of a short-term study to explore the challenges experienced by patients with sensory impairment in relation to their safe and effective access to and use of medicines and medical devices. This study was conducted from September to December 2024. The primary data that were generated were derived from three sources: Focus groups involving individuals with visual impairment or loss, including people with diabetes. Key Informant responses to an electronic survey. Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) Yellow Card reports. Patients reported distressing experiences due to inaccessible packaging, unreadable patient information, inadequate communication about medication changes and a lack of suitable reporting mechanisms for issues. The report makes the following recommendations: The MHRA needs to review – working alongside patients – whether their current guidance and regulations for the licencing and packaging of medicines goes as far as is possible to enable their safe use by those with sensory impairment. The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI), MHRA and Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) should work together to restart work – alongside published milestones – to digitise paper-based patient information leaflets via the existing UK Electronic Patient Information Task Force (ePIL). As part of this restart, ePIL – working with patients – should examine how to maximise the benefits of this work for patients with sensory impairment. NHS England’s Diabetes Programme Team should launch a patient reference group to assess, understand and mitigate the barriers and enablers to the safe and effective roll-out of medical devices and other education programmes for the management of diabetes (such as DAFNE) for those with sensory impairments. DHSC and NHS England need to ensure the work announced to improve and expand the NHS App in ‘Reforming elective care for patients’ includes an assessment – conducted with the input of patients – to determine whether further accessibility improvements are required, especially for people with visual impairment. In a number of other areas, the report states that the Patient Safety Commissioner wants to make observations to a number of bodies – highlighting the outcome without specifying the solutions, in keeping with the ethos of the recent Health Services Safety Investigations Body (HSSIB) report ‘Recommendations but no action: improving the effectiveness of quality and safety recommendations in healthcare.’ The report makes the following observations: A patient’s medical record needs to include a prominent flag of accessibility needs and detailed information about these needs to ensure that the healthcare professional can provide any required reasonable adjustments. All relevant healthcare professionals – including community pharmacists – must have sufficient access to these patient records and flags. Healthcare professionals, particularly community pharmacy personnel and others involved in the direct supply of medicines and medical devices, must have sufficient funding to support the additional time and resources required by to undertake assessments of patient needs and provide the required ‘reasonable adjustments’ for medicines and medical devices. With the anticipated increase in prevalence of sensory impairment amongst the general population, further guidance is required to promote evidence-based practice by health and social care professionals in terms of the medicine journey of people with sensory impairment. It is also crucial that there is provision of training to healthcare professionals (ideally within the undergraduate curricula) regarding the needs of people with sensory impairment. People with experience of sensory impairment should be included in the design of medical devices, as well as user information and instructions to accompany their supply and use. Manufacturers need to provide more resources to facilitate the demonstration of the effective use of medical devices, especially for people with visual impairment.