1106 - Impacting the Deaf Community by Improving Nursing Understanding and Communication

One component of nursing includes the ability to effectively communicate with all patients. One of our most vulnerable populations includes the Deaf and Hard of Hearing(D/HH) community. In order to bridge this gap, the Nursing and ASL interpreting programs have developed an interprofessional simulation around this patient population.

Client’s in the Deaf and Hard of Hearing(D/HH) communities are challenged with effective communication in nearly every encounter they have within the medical field, from appointments with general practitioners to visits to hospitals. Nurses represent the largest profession within the healthcare community. One of Nursing’s main roles is to provide patient advocacy, yet many nursing programs fail to properly educate students about D/HH patients’ experiences and perspectives, the ethical and legal ramifications of nurse’s decisions when treating them, and best practices when working with American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters.

Nursing students (NS) and ASL Interpreting students (IS) come together to work through a robust interdisciplinary simulation, with D/HH community members as standardized patients (SP).

Both sets of students receive information about D/HH communication needs and laws applicable to treating D/HH patients as part of their Pre-Simulation work, as well as an example video of an interaction with a client. Upon completion of the client interaction, the SP’s join in the debrief during which the NS and IS reflect on their experience and receive feedback from the SP’s about their performance from the client’s perspective.

The results of these simulations have been great. Not only do the participants express a wish for more experiences similar to this, but the potential impact on patient care for this community is also impacted in a positive way by the knowledge gained in this experience when they meet similar patients as Registered Nurses in the future.