This ‘working in partnership to transform healthcare experiences and outcomes for d/Deaf people’ project was shortlisted in the ‘partnership working to improve the experience’ category of the Patient Experience Network National Awards 2024 (PENNA24).
Introduction:
This project is a collaboration between 4 organisations: Deaflink, Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust(NHCT), Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (NuTH) and Cumbria, Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS Foundation Trust (CNTW).
Project summary:
Evidence shows the BSL (British Sign Language) community has higher-than-average health conditions not deriving from deafness. Most are preventable, leading to health inequalities and increased mortality. Despite existing legislation, health services routinely ‘fail’ the Deaf community as they are not accessible; miscommunication, inaccessible information and lack of understanding lead to treatment delays and poorer outcomes. Working with the Deaf community and regional hospital trusts, Deaflink developed an innovative ‘BSL Health Navigator’ role to transform healthcare experiences and outcomes for Deaf patients, providing personalised help to ‘navigate’ healthcare journeys (preparing for appointments, aiding communication, supporting discharge, ensuring treatment options are understood, and engaging with hospital staff and the Deaf community to improve services).
The project is led by people with lived experience, employed as Health Navigators, overseen by a multi-agency, system-wide steering group. Over 80 BSL users have been supported, with over 2,885 health/social-care related contacts. Working in partnership has improved patient experience/outcomes, inclusion, access and waiting times.
We believe our innovation is transferable to improve involvement and inclusion for people with other disabilities and long-term health conditions.
Impact and results achieved:
We established core metrics for a theory of change model, developed as a partnership. This was challenging because many Deaf people struggle with traditional approaches for feedback, and NHS Trusts are poor at recording peoples’ BSL status. However, user-evaluation was built in from the start, with structured feedback from clients (supported surveys), case studies/stories and anecdotal information. Deaflink provided monthly progress reports, incorporating data on the numbers of BSL people supported, the types of intervention, and case studies illustrating impact by highlighting the complexity of inclusion and accessibility issues. Reports demonstrated emotional, mental, and physical impact, and patient safety issues that poor access was having.
Since April 2022, over 80 clients have accessed the service, often multiple times after discovering its benefit. The Navigators have offered 2,885 healthcare contacts, frequently helping at numerous points to ensure success of a single healthcare appointment.
Over 70 different health conditions have been supported, suggesting prevalence of co-morbidity and successive health episodes in this community. The Navigators have helped to identify specific patient issues and escalate them, improving patient safety, and highlighting just how complex it is for BSL users to access healthcare/how many barriers there are. The partnership is having a significant impact, improving outcomes for BSL users. Deaf people have better access to acute emergency/ambulatory/urgent care, outpatient appointments, mental health treatments, social work, dental care, pharmacy, and primary care.
What makes this initiative stand out?
The steering group is unique in driving change and recognition of issues, with strong commitment from all partners. Working in partnership allows more effective identification of barriers which prevent access to services, raising awareness and generating solutions to complex issues, e.g. reliable BSL interpretation. Working jointly helps us integrate our organisational approaches, and share key information/resources. Data collection has been problematic, meaning identification of need has historically been an issue; working together will help us explore how to improve coding practice to obtain the full picture, develop a dataset, and implement a monitoring process at a strategic level.
Contact details
Joanne Mackintosh – [email protected]
