Assessing Deaf patients in the neurology clinic.

There are over 87 000 Deaf people in the UK with British Sign Language (BSL) as their first language.1 Few healthcare professionals receive training in Deaf awareness or in BSL, and missed diagnoses and inadequate treatment of Deaf patients are estimated to cost the National Health Service £30 million per year.2 Neurologists are likely to encounter Deaf BSL users in their practice, but without prior experience may find consultations challenging, especially within the time constraints and pressure of a standard clinic. In this article, we provide guidance on consulting with Deaf people in a neurology clinic, drawing on experience from our cognitive clinic for Deaf BSL users where effective communication is essential.

Evaluation of a specialist cognitive clinic for the Deaf community.

There are significant health inequalities between Deaf and hearing people, including barriers to accessing care and communication difficulties in consultations. Such problems have particularly affected Deaf people with acquired cognitive deficits, leading to late and missed diagnoses. We therefore established a specialist cognitive clinic for the Deaf community in 2011 at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, which to our knowledge is the first of its kind in the world. In this study, we retrospectively analysed electronic patient records to evaluate the service and its impact since inception. We found that Deaf patients who use British sign language had difficulty obtaining an accurate diagnosis before attending our specialist clinic, highlighting the importance of tailored services for Deaf people. Our results show that the clinic improved communication for patients and accessibility to specialist investigations, ensuring diagnostic accuracy and overall reducing health inequality for this population.