120 Palliative care for the deaf community – an equitable service?

<h3>Introduction</h3> Guidelines and resources for provision of Specialist Palliative Care (SPC) in hard to reach groups has been gaining momentum. They highlight the need to develop an equitable service for all patient groups. A recent review suggests that the Deaf Community is not always considered. Locally, recent clinical events at SWFT have highlighted inequalities in communication and care with patients from the Deaf community. Key issues in providing equitable Community SPC were: Lack of consistency for staff to provide information to patients who use British Sign Language (BSL) on how to access community services Reliance on patients’ ability to read text (when BSL is their first language) Staff over-reliance patients’ family or friends to interpret BSL Inconsistencies around accessibility of a BSL trained interpreter Assumptions that there is a direct translation of Palliative care vocabulary from English into BSL, particularly in Advance Care Planning and End of Life conversations <h3>Next steps</h3> Following the recognition that patients from the Deaf community have limited access to SPC services, some patients were able to text a 24 hour mobile number for Community Rapid Response support from a local hospice. Action Deafness are scheduled to deliver bespoke training to the local SPC teams. A member of the SWFT Resus team is escalating the lack of provision for patients from the Deaf Community in ReSPECT conversations to the UK RESUS council. What does progress look like? The British Deaf Association has developed a Deaf Dementia toolkit and St John Ambulance has developed BSL first aid resources. Some hospices have developed an app to support on-demand BSL interpreters and video-calls. We are in the process of a formal literature review to understand how to improve the provision of SPC to the Deaf Community.