October 19 Disabilities Awareness Item

Dear Friends,

Today’s message is several items about deaf people, language issues, and other life changes. I am seasoning whether to make this more than one entry. Frankly, I am not quite sure why the topic is so firmly evoking Inner Blowtorch but I am offering a variety of choices about how to interact with the topic. The material probably most topical to do with anything at Meeting is at the bottom; I expect Friends will find the excursion to get there variably interesting.

First, a blog link to a video about sign language interpreters, presuming on people’s time and capacities, and privilege.
http://rantwoman.blogspot.com/2011/07/really-great-client-education-sign.html

The video link on this blog page is about 6 minutes long. Warning: the F word appears once along with pointed discussion of ethics. Youtube serves up a bunch of other videos about sign language interpreting. I followed one link and got some great ones about teachers too.

The interpreter in the above video is a hearing person. Here is an item where people might actually work with a deaf interpreter. This Item is from the Seattle Times via an interpreters’ discussion list.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2016474808_bhutanrefugee12.html

The rudimentary sign language used by deaf people who have never had a chance to attend school, for instance with their also unschooled hearing family members, is called home sign. Often an educated deaf person or a very experienced hearing interpreter will have the best success working out how to communicate with people in this situation. The article is interesting to me because it talks a little about this in the context of a community college class helping acclimate the refugees to life in he US and the elaboration of their language as they work together.

When I think about sign language and the power of people coming together, I think about the school for the deaf in Nicaragua. Apparently some member of the Somoza family was deaf and one of the dictator’s female relatives helped organize a school in the 1970’s before the Nicaraguan revolution. The first generation of students came from all over Nicaragua and all used individual versions of home sign. Over a couple generations and across several political regimes, the language has become much more complex with dramatically increased use of abstract concepts and metaphor. There are lots of articles about this; the one here seems like a decent basic introduction.
http://www.news-medical.net/news/2004/09/18/4883.aspx

Now the lawsuit of the week. Medical facilities in Seattle are probably better about interpreter issues than in other parts of the country and I still spend a fair amount of time hearing about deaf people experiencing communications barriers. I expect that more cases like the one in this news item get reported on sign language interpreter lists than on spoken language lists but I see more than one a month on the email lists I read. In other words, 20 years after the ADA, with a number of processes in place to encourage people to get services to deaf people right, LOTS of people still miss the boat.
In the case here issues include:
Relying on fallible and non-functioning technology for one encounter.
Repeatedly failing to book an interpreter even when there is sufficient advance notice.
Repeatedly relying on untrained family members.
Unnecessarily traumatizing a child with exposure to complex and sensitive medical topics.

http://sentinelsource.com/news/local/hospital-settles-lawsuit/article_5673faa3-8b20-5c8d-a0e4-d65e8d021d48.html


Hospital settles lawsuit
A Keene hospital has agreed to pay a $25,000 federal fine and put in place a program to provide interpreters to patients who are deaf or hard of hearing in a settlement of a lawsuit alleging discrimination.

In documents filed last week in U.S. District Court in Concord, Cheshire Medical Center/Dartmouth-Hitchcock Keene disputed the discrimination claim and denied liability in the case, which is the second lawsuit against the hospital alleging discrimination against a deaf patient in seven years.

“We agreed to this consent decree because we are committed to providing effective communications with our deaf and hard-of-hearing patients and we continue to focus on patient-centered excellence at the hospital,” said Sandra M. Phipps, senior director of development and communications. “It’s our commitment to provide compassionate, quality health care for every patient every time and in our looking at the consent decree and examining programs in place, we do recognize that the level and consistency of services to our deaf and hard-of-hearing patients in the past is not what we expected and not what they deserved.”

The recently resolved case involved three visits to the hospital in October 2009 by a patient, Laura Waldren, who is deaf. According to court documents, Waldren made an appointment at the hospital to see a doctor and requested a sign-language interpreter be present at the visit, which was scheduled for two days later. When she arrived at the appointment, an interpreter was not available and doctors and nurses relied on written notes to communicate with Waldren, documents showed.

A few days later, Waldren contacted the hospital to inform officials that she needed to be seen in the emergency room and would need an interpreter. Waldren’s mother, Jeanne Waldren of Vermont, drove her to the hospital, along with Waldren’s 9-year-old daughter. When they arrived, hospital staff said a sign-language interpreter was not available and relied first on a faulty video interpretation system before requesting that Waldren’s mother interpret for them.

Waldren’s mother, who is not a trained sign-language interpreter, had difficulty explaining technical medical terms to her daughter, but felt she had to act as an interpreter for her daughter to receive medical care, according to the complaint filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office. And because Waldren’s mother had to be with her daughter in the examination room to serve as an interpreter, Waldren’s young daughter also had to be in the room while the doctors discussed sensitive medical issues with Waldren, the complaint said.

Following the emergency room visit, Waldren made a follow-up appointment a few days later and, again, an interpreter was not available so doctors relied on written notes and Waldren’s mother to explain that she would need an outpatient surgical procedure, according to the court documents. Waldren’s mother was not in the room when doctors asked Waldren to sign a consent form for the surgery, which Waldren didn’t understand, according to the complaint. Throughout her visits, Waldren was never asked to sign a waiver form agreeing to see a doctor without an interpreter, which is part of the hospital’s written policies, according to the complaint. The hospital’s policy on providing services for patients who are deaf or hard of hearing was stipulated in a 2005 settlement between the hospital and an unidentified patient and the Disability Rights Center, according to court documents.

According to the 51-page consent decree in the latest case, the hospital has 90 days to design a program to provide appropriate aids and services to patients. Among the requirements of the settlement: the hospital must designate at least two staff members who are available round-the-clock to arrange for auxiliary aids, such as interpreters, when needed by patients; it has to compile a list of freelance interpreters within 30 days and sign a contract within 60 days with an interpreter to be available when needed; and it must create and maintain a log of requests for auxiliary services.

A team of hospital officials has been working for about three months on reshaping the hospital’s program to improve services for people who need interpreters and building its network of sign-language interpreters who can work on-site when requested, said Phipps, the hospital’s spokeswoman The hospital has added a new full-time staff position as coordinator for the hospital’s interpretation services and is in the hiring process, Phipps said. The agreement also requires training for staff members and postings in the hospital directing patients on how they can request interpretation services if they need them.

The N.H. Business Review reported that the hospital also reached a settlement with Laura and Jeanne Waldren that was not disclosed in court documents.

Casey Farrar can be reached at 352-1234, extension 1435, or cfarrar@keenesentinel.com.

Miscellaneous informational bits
A deaf person whose first language is ASL will sometimes write English with ASL syntax. This can be important to know when looking at written documents and can be a big difference between someone who learns ASL as a child and older people who lose hearing after a lifetime of work and reading and writing in English. For extra entertainment value, one can mix in with ASL syntax literal translations done by someone working from a dictionary for another language into English.

American Sign Language and English are two different languages. Assuming someone will use ASL just because he or she has lost hearing is just like assuming someone with vision loss will automatically and instantly be adept at Braille. Ha!

There is a Law and Order episode where the twist revolves around whether a deaf or hearing person wrote a message through the relay system to assist deaf people with making phone calls. Two deaf people who both have TTY’s or an internet connection will contact each other directly and type back and forth. If a conversation involves a deaf and a hearing person, calls will go through a relay system: the deaf person types and an operator reads it to a hearing person; the hearing person speaks and the relay operator types for the deaf person.
For anyone just assembling current info, here is a link to the WA Relay Service; at this point there are also internet-based relay services:
http://www.washingtonrelay.com/



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Thinking about different experiences:
My family had a long-time friend who lost hearing due to a stroke at some point in mid-life. I never knew him before he lost his hearing. He could lip-read really well and he and my mother could talk for hours. For me, it was easy to get him started talking just by writing a question or two on paper. I am not sure why no one ever thought to ask him about a Voice carryover telephone, one that would have allowed him to talk but required callers to have a relay service type the other side of the call.
To me sometime it would be interesting to do worship sharing, say at a retreat, about Friends experiences of disability over time, both lifespan and in terms of different realities in different eras.

For the woman in the article above, insisting on communicating by writing notes was completely inappropriate because she used and preferred another communication method. However for many people who lose hearing late in life, writing notes can be really, really important.

Our Meeting has had two different Deaf members at different times. One I think married someone who had done a lot of interpreting for him; they frequently worshipped together and Meeting budgeted for an ASL interpreter as part of including the whole family in our community. In the other case, the Friend relied on his wife and never used any other option; all of their children also used Sign language .

Once in awhile I am called to meditate about whether some message has not gotten through just because of literally not being heard.

In the Light.

(RantWoman)