This week is International Week of Deaf People. We spoke with Catherine Lock, Quality Improvement Lead for Deaf Services at Elysium, who told us more about signing and the importance of British Sign Language in crossing the cultural divide.
“All Saints Hospital supports men who are deaf and we asked them how they wanted to mark International Sign Language Week and International Week of Deaf People. They said they wanted to learn and teach each other about international fingerspelling. This uses only one hand to spell out words (British Sign Language uses two) and it can be a good way for people to basically communicate cross culturally globally, such as spelling out their name.
“Sign language and fingerspelling are different. Sign Language is a visual means of communicating using sign gestures, facial expression, and body language. Fingerspelling is a method where you can ‘borrow’ vocabulary from the written form of a spoken language.
“The fingerspelling alphabet is used in sign language to spell out names of people and places for which there is not a sign. You don’t want to finger-spell everything and so it doesn’t replace sign language, but it can be a good way to help cross the language barriers that can exist.
“As a service, we are very focused on the importance of British Sign Language. We aim to have everyone working in the hospital, in whichever role, at least trained to BSL Level 1. This is basic minimal conversation. Our national specialism services benchmark standards recommend that all those working in clinical roles should be trained to BSL Level 2 and ideally we would like people to be trained to BSL Level 3, which incorporates more complex linguistics. To compare, Level 2 would be like someone about to do GCSE in a language, whereas Level 3 is like an A level.
“BSL is a recognised language, a sign language in the UK. It was recognised as a language in its own right in 2003 but did not have any legal protection until 2022 when the BSL Act was passed where it is now legally recognised as an official language of UK. It isn’t just signing direct representations of conversations and words – it has its own grammar and is structured in a completely different way from English. It also involves a combination of hand shapes and movements, lip patterns, facial expressions.
“It’s very important therefore that people, particularly those supported in hospital settings, can be communicated with accurately and using their preferred language and methods of communication. It’s now set out in law that this is the case. The NHS Accessible Information Standard (AIS), introduced in 2016, gives Deaf and disabled people the legal right to receive health and social care information and communications in a format that works for them.
“There is still some way to go – we often find that health providers just assume they don’t have the responsibility to provide an interpreter, for example. But it is their responsibility to make sure information is accessible to the Deaf person. Weeks such as this week help raise awareness of all different aspects of communication and the ongoing barriers that Deaf people can face.”