Media Releases & Enquiries
Royal United Hospital Bath:
First in the UK to provide new communications service for deaf and foreign language patients.
A joint service to provide profoundly deaf people with on-line interpreter facilities and provide deaf awareness training for staff, is being launched for the first time nationally, at the Royal United Hospital Bath NHS Trust.
The RUH is working with Sign Health, a national healthcare charity for deaf people – to offer ‘Sign Translate’. This unique web-based offers profoundly deaf patients access to a fully trained on-line interpreter who interprets the consultation between a deaf patient and our clinicians, to explain treatments, procedures, and diagnoses and answer any general questions they may have.
Sign Translate also converts more than 500 medical questions into British Sign Language video clips for a deaf patient.
These questions are also available in 12 foreign languages and so this new system will also help many of our foreign visitor patients or indeed any patient where English is not their first language. For a city like Bath with so many foreign visitors, this is a very useful service to have.
Consultant respiratory physician, Dr Andrew Alexander has been the driving force behind bringing Sign Translate to the RUH says: “My interest in health care for deaf people comes from having a deaf daughter. We communicate through British Sign Language at home and I am aware of the problems deaf people have in accessing health care and in understanding consultations with health care professionals. Deaf people normally rely on family and friends to interpret at hospital visits but they are not usually qualified interpreters and communication in a medical consultation needs to be 100%, so relying on lip reading and writing notes is often inadequate. By having Sign Translate at the RUH, we can ensure we provide deaf people and those who don’t speak English with vital support.”
The services will be used via COWS – computers on wheels – which can be easily taken to the department where either the sign translating or foreign language assistance is needed, at any time night or day. Over the past three months, training has been underway at the hospital and so the launch of Sign Translate has therefore been accompanied by a programme of Deaf Awareness training for more than 200 staff. From Monday 15th June, the services will be available to patients.
You are invited to a media launch and to see training and Sign Translate being used in a clinical environment on Friday 12th June at 12.00 noon. Please come to the Main Reception in the Atrium.