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 | You and Yours - Transcript ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio 4 |
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| TX: 05.05.04 – NHS IS FAILING DEAF PEOPLE SAYS RNID PRESENTER: WINIFRED ROBINSON |
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| THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE ´óÏó´«Ã½ CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY ROBINSON If you, or anyone you love, have been in hospital lately then you'll know how difficult it can sometimes be to follow what the doctors and nurses are telling you. Imagine then how much more difficult it is for people who are hard of hearing or profoundly deaf. A report today, from the Royal National Institute for the Deaf, says that health professionals are failing deaf people. They've carried out a survey which suggests that poor communication is leading to missed appointments and uncertainty about how much medication to take. We'll be speaking to the RNID in a moment. First though a case in point. Doris Ingram died in hospital two years ago, her daughter Jean Bowerman feels that her mother shouldn't have been asked to consent to the routine procedure which led to her death without a family member being present. BOWERMAN She went into hospital, she was very hard of hearing, she knew that she needed some help to interpret what was told to her when her treatment was being discussed. So she told this to the staff and my sister, who was with her, also told this to the staff. She had a blood transfusion to help the presenting problem of anaemia and after further tests the hospital decided that she needed to have a colonoscopy procedure. Discussions about this did not entail a family member with my mother and although my mother gave consent for this it's our belief that she didn't have the full information about it. The operation went ahead - well the procedure, I don't think it's classed as an operation - and she did have a serious haemorrhage, the effects of it did cause her death. ROBINSON Are you convinced that your mother didn't understand the risks involved because she was hard of hearing? BOWERMAN Yes I am. It wasn't that she was absolutely deaf but she missed the details of what was said. She used to be quite embarrassed to continually be asking for things to be repeated and would often just nod and that's when we would come in and say - Mum have you heard that, what was actually said was this and you've said yes? And then she would say - Oh no that's not what I wanted. ROBINSON After your mother died, I know that you and your sister complained to the hospital about the way she had been treated and about the fact that neither of you had been there at the time when she gave her consent for the procedure, how did the hospital respond? BOWERMAN We have got to the point where we had local resolution, which was a meeting with the hospital. My sister and I were not really satisfied with the outcome of that and the next stage involved us asking for an independent review of the case. That was denied to us and our only recourse now is the health ombudsman. ROBINSON What do you think should change? BOWERMAN I think we want the patients' wishes to be respected, we want the information that's written in the notes to actually be acted on. Most of all we want to have some change brought in so that hard of hearing people do get what they need. ROBINSON Jean Bowerman. Barnsley District General Hospital NHS Trust gave us this statement. They say: We accept that our staff didn't meet best practice in providing information or by directly involving the family in all of the clinical discussions and we are sorry that Mrs Bowerman and her sister feel that the care of their mother was not as they had anticipated. We would reassure them that their complaint has been thoroughly investigated and that our practices have been carefully reviewed. Well Brian Lamb is from the RNID. Is this case an isolated incident? LAMB Oh we only wish it was, unfortunately the reason why we did the research was to find out how often this was going on. And it seems that it's far from untypical. We found, for example, that a third of people were either leaving their doctors' surgeries or medical conversations unaware of how much medication they should take, for example, that many people - up to 70% when we're looking at people with profound deafness - did not have any communication support while they were in hospital. So it's not surprising that these kind of things will be happening if those are the kind of figures we were finding. Also we found, for example, that almost a quarter of people were missing hospital appointments and even a fifth were missing follow up appointments, costing the NHS over £20 million. ROBINSON Well you mention costs, these are very sad stories obviously but is this a problem that it would simply be too costly for the NHS to put right? LAMB No that's the irony about the whole situation, it would cost the NHS very little to put this right. In many cases what you just need is good communication support, using existing technologies such as loop systems, such as interpreters, much less, we think, than the 20 million they're wasting at the moment on the missed appointments. ROBINSON If it isn't addressed is there anything much that you or anyone else can do about it? LAMB Yes there is. The Disability Discrimination Act requires that from September 2004 that hospitals have to provide good physical access, so the loop systems I was talking about would be an example, and they're already supposed to ensure that they provide good care to patients and that they don't discriminate against patients. So things like interpreters where you have someone that uses sign language should be being provided now. ROBINSON Brian Lamb from the RNID thank you. Back to the You and Yours homepage The ´óÏó´«Ã½ is not responsible for external websites |
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