An exploration of how health care professionals understand experiences of deafness

Abstract

Findings from recent deaf education intervention programmes with health care professionals emphasise the importance of sociocultural dimensions of medicine, pointing to the need to further investigate health professionals’ current understandings of deafness. Situated within a social constructionist and critical realist framework, we investigated health professionals’ understandings of deafness and experiences of providing health services in Australia to d/Deaf people. Through an inductive thematic analysis of 18 individual interviews with medical or allied health professionals, we identified an overarching theme we labelled hearingness as privileged, whereby professionals accounted for the quality of the health services available to d/Deaf people in Australia. The professionals recognised the services as not good enough and, through relating their efforts to do the best they can, and describing how the situation could always be better, it was evident that the professionals were negotiating a larger health system that disadvantages the needs of d/Deaf people for the needs of people with hearingness. We discuss the implications of working within a system that privileges hearingness.

Keywords:

• Community and public health
• critical realism
• hearing/deafness
• thematic analysis
• privilege

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the various individuals who contributed to the development of this project and the preparation of this manuscript. In particular, the health professionals for sharing their experiences with us; Bernadette Chapman for her interpreting services, Jenny Setchell who helped greatly with recruitment and Britta Wigginton and Asphyxia for their constructive feedback.

Notes

1. The term deafness refers to the physiological condition. In line with sociocultural paradigm of deafness, we opt to use the phrase d/Deaf (and HoH where relevant) to respect the diverse and fluid audiological/linguistic/social identities that operate within this context. We do not make specific claims about level or type of hearing loss, communication preference and skills or use of hearing technology.

2. Audism refers to the notion that one is superior based on one’s ability to hear or behave in the manner of one who hears (Humphries, 1975).

3. Numbers in brackets refer to length of pauses in talk in seconds.

4. Therapeutic tools is used here to refer to assessments or measures of any kind relevant to the provision of care (risk, medical, mental state etc.).