'Positive Support' Will Mean Better Service Provision For Families Of Young Deaf Children, UK

Main Category: Hearing / Deafness
Also Included In: Ear, Nose and Throat;  Pediatrics / Children's Health
Article Date: 30 Oct 2009 - 3:00 PST

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An innovative four-year project to help families, service providers and policy makers understand the effectiveness of the different types of support available for young deaf children has come to an end, with some interesting findings.

Positive Support in the lives of Deaf Children and their Families was a research project funded by the Big Lottery Fund via a partnership with Deafness Research UK. 'Positive Support' builds on an opportunity presented by the introduction of the NHS Newborn Hearing Screening Programme in 2002 resulting in many changes to the services available for deaf children and their families. Children with permanent hearing loss are now identified significantly earlier than before the programme was introduced, meaning that families are facing many important life issues while their child is still very young. 82 families from across the UK provided the research team with information, via several questionnaires, on their thoughts and feelings about the services available for young deaf children. In addition, each family nominated three professionals, such as their Teacher of the Deaf, to complete a set of questionnaires on their views. Measures of the children's development were also collected at regular intervals throughout the study.

This large and complex study found that the use of sign language in the early months and years of a deaf child's life did not impede the development of spoken language; that greater collaborative working is needed between audiologists and teachers of the deaf to maximise benefit to deaf children from amplification; and, importantly, there is an association between earlier identification of deafness (within the first six months) and improved developmental performance.

Ade Deane-Pratt, Research Communications Manager for Deafness Research UK, said: "This important research will have a significant impact on service provision for deaf children and their families in the future. The unique multi-level partnership we have been involved in here - between research teams, funders and parent groups - is one of the areas in which Deafness Research UK achieves best value from funding sources and will make a real and positive difference to the lives of people in local communities.

Professor John Bamford, who led the research team at the University of Manchester, said "Our results show that on average, deaf children's performance is somewhat delayed compared with typical hearing children, although there is considerable variability. However, when service providers adapted to parental requests to allow additional time for single case management we saw a high level of satisfaction from the families".

The project has also created two new tools which will be made available beyond the life of the project. The MacArthur Bates CDI has been validated and standardised in BSL and Deafness Research UK will be collaborating in its publication. A parent report measure for assessing the quality of early intervention services (the MVOS - My Views on Services) has already been published. Data and research publications from these and other parts of the study will be available in the coming months. See the project website at www.positivesupport.info for details.

The study was conducted in conjunction with University College London (UCL) and the National Deaf Children's Society.

Source
Deafness Research UK