A colleague is making a training film for Vision UK, a charity, about the experience that people with sight, hearing and learning difficulties have of going to the doctor. The film is aimed at staff in GPs’ surgeries, to raise awareness of the issues and encourage them to do more to make visits to the doctor more accessible and manageable.
The film points out that exchanges which most of us will take for granted – like making an appointment, requesting a prescription or describing our symptoms to the GP – are not so straightforward when there are communication barriers.
Talking to her about the project, it became clear that people with hearing difficulties have an especially tricky time, not just because they can’t hear but because written language is not necessarily straightforward for them to understand either.
I suppose it’s obvious once you start thinking about but it was a revelation to me. If you’ve never been able to hear, the meaning, peculiarities and nuances of written language can be obscure and really hard to follow.
This even extends to text messages – so text shorthand, such as ‘ur’, makes no sense if you’ve never hear the words ‘you are’ spoken out loud.
This feels like a double insult – not only being deaf but not being able to make good use of written language either. I understand now why some deaf people feel so isolated and excluded from mainstream human interaction.
There are lessons in here for communicators too, about assumptions we make of people who don’t seem to ‘get it’, and how, with the important, life and death stuff, it’s worth finding as many ways as possible to get a message out: say it, write it, show it, illustrate it, get people to do it themselves. Because the methods we always use and take for granted may not make sense to some of our audience.
21 January 2010
Hearing, language and communication
A colleague is making a training film for Vision UK, a charity, about the experience that people with sight, hearing and learning difficulties have of going to the doctor. The film is aimed at staff in GPs’ surgeries, to raise awareness of the issues and encourage them to do more to make visits to the doctor more accessible and manageable.
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