Often, a deaf patient walks into an optometrist’s practice seeking help with his/her eyes. There is a high likelihood that poor communication between patient and healthcare professional will influence the final product dispensed. This has been the personal experience of the author over the years in private practice.
The article aims to start a debate on the quality of service given to a section of the population. The optometric services given to the deaf are in a way compromised by the communication barrier between patient and healthcare professional.
A review of several studies on provision of healthcare services to the deaf was conducted. Further information was included on the importance of vision to the deaf.
Eighteen full-text articles from around the world were included. The review found that the deaf use sight to compensate for their loss of hearing.
Deaf people rely on the sense of sight to make up for hearing loss. Training optometry graduates in sign language will improve the provider-patient communication with the deaf, thereby preventing the prevalence of deaf-blindness, which is an impediment to both development and education. A debate must be initiated on where the language can be incorporated into the already congested training programme.
It is often the case that a deaf patient will enter an optometric practice for eye care. In more than 20 years of practicing optometry, the author has come across several such patients, and the communication barriers between practitioner and patient have a direct impact on the outcome, and this affects the quality of service the patient receives. The author would always rely on the writing skills of the deaf patient, only to find that there are those with limited or no writing skills at all, which made patient care even more difficult. As Harmer said, good provider–patient communication is fundamental to achieving positive treatment outcomes.
The term ‘deaf’ refers to hearing loss that profoundly limits the ability to hear and understand speech, even with amplification; ‘hard of hearing’ refers to those with hearing loss who are able to get some linguistically useful information from sound, with or without amplification.
According to Harmer, deaf people visit health care providers more frequently than do hearing persons, but report less satisfaction with the health services they receive.
Deafness is a common sensorial deficit in the world; one of every 500–1000 newborns have permanent bilateral profound hearing loss.
Seeing that the deaf population rely mostly on their sense of sight to make up for their hearing loss, an effort must be made to expose eye care service providers to communication skills with the deaf. This will go a long way to preventing the prevalence of deaf-blindness, which affects not only communication but also the development and education of the patient; a child who is hearing and visually impaired is significantly more debilitated, being less able to lip read, less cooperative and less capable of manual tasks than hearing impaired children with normal vision.
Optometry as part of primary health care service will therefore benefit from basic knowledge of sign language. (One university in South Africa has reviewed its language policy to incorporate an African language at undergraduate level.) Exposing optometry graduates to sign language will go a long way towards making the profession relevant in providing a service to a community that puts more value to their vision than we can imagine. Hearing and vision are responsible for 95% of environmental cognition; because affected children are dependent on their visual sensation, correction of visual problems in deaf patients is very important.
This article is a call to optometrists to debate the exclusion of a section of the population from comprehensive eye care because of breakdown in communication. Again, one in every 500–1000 newborns has permanent bilateral profound hearing loss.
The author declares that he has no financial or personal relationships that may have inappropriately influenced him in writing this article.