Communication Support

For deaf or hearing impaired people who do not use British Sign Language, the everyday interactions which are unremarkable for hearing people take on huge challenging dimensions, so challenging that on many occasions deaf or deafened people simply opt out, either giving up on such interactions or surrendering their independence and having to rely on someone to act on their behalf.

The public sector in Scotland has, over the years that so far make up the 21^st century, managed to convince themselves that they are bold, daring, pioneers in participative service design, delivery and quality control, frequently declaiming on corporate web sites, Twitter, TikTok and the rest that the service user is at the heart of everything they do. Quite how that stood up when older people were forced out of hospital beds at the start of the Covid19 pandemic and bundled into care homes where many subsequently died, remains unclear.

A fundamental flaw in the participative model commonly used in the public sector is that the sector remains in full control of how the agenda is set – how often does Scotland’s First Minster decide we need a national ‘conversation’ on something – and rarely consults with or involves anyone other than ‘people like us’. This inevitably provides a ‘conversation’ summary – authored by the agenda setters themselves - which affirms in delightfully pale pastel shades of language that for ‘people like us’ the system/services work rather well and that there is no need for radical re-design of anything, but that difficult choices – always taken by the agenda setters - will have to be taken on the priorities of what the sector will do in the future.

There are any number of aspects to the established participative culture and practices which require scrutiny and challenge if the old order of ‘people like us’ is to be made redundant. In 2020, Equality Here, Now undertook research and looked at just one tiny strand of participation and involvement, in the form of communication support provided to deaf or hearing impaired people not using BSL. The aim was to capture a sense of how much/often the public sector in Scotland engages with deaf or hearing impaired people in designing and delivering services and ensuring their views and experiences are built in to how those services are delivered.

The research concluded :

Over 800,000 deaf or hearing impaired people not using BSL in Scotland [almost 15% of the population] are not guaranteed a place at the table when conversations across the public sector take place around public sector service design, re-design or monitoring of services to ensure they are fit for purpose and equally accessible to all.

Even on those all too rare occasions when deaf or hearing impaired people not using BSL do manage to get a place at the table, no formal checks are taking place on the quality of communication support provided to enable their active participation. It is evidently not routine in the public sector to check that the communication support is to a measurable standard which is fit for purpose. No quality checks leaves open the possibility that communication support is simply so poor that it becomes yet another part of the barriers which routinely exclude deaf or hearing impaired people not using BSL from equal, active and informed participation in shaping the future of public sector services in Scotland. It is arguably the case that Scotland’s model of participative civic society is one which does not in fact hear the voices of deaf and hearing impaired people not using BSL.