POLICE AND HOSPITAL ACCESSIBILITY
Hello, my name is Bev.
We are discussing about the hospitals and police on improving accessibility for communication. We, committees, have worked very hard to advocacy hospitals.
We wrote a letter to Oshawa hospital in January 2011 to advise that there had been a few complaints from local Deaf consumers and requested clarification about their complaint process because it is not clear and the consumers did not feel satisfied with the results.
We received a letter from Oshawa hospital in February 2011. They have a complaint process on their website and gave us the website link. They advised that they have not received a complaint from a Deaf person who was not provided with an interpreter.
We wrote a letter to Oshawa hospital in April 2011 asking if their complaint process can be translated in ASL so Deaf people can view in ASL video on their complaint procedure. We asked for more information about their accessibility training for staff at their hospital. We have not heard from them since.
We also wrote a letter to Ajax hospital to ask about their complaint procedure. They came to our DDAC meeting. They have explained about their hospital and shown us their website. They have shown their interest in getting some of their website translates in ASL. We will follow it up with them.
We plan to follow up with the Oshawa and Ajax hospital later on this year.
Durham Police has developed an e-learning CD for accessibility training on about how to work with Deaf and Hard of Hearing people to the police officers through college. Some of our committee have seen the e-learning CD and we provided feedback. We weren’t sure if they took our feedback and make changes to e-learning CD and we also weren’t sure if they have used it to train the police officers. We hope they will contact us in the future for any advice they need.
If you had a bad experience with not receiving accessible services at a hospital or with the police in the Durham Region, please let CHS or DDAC know. We can follow up with them. As you know it’s not perfect yet however; we will continue to advocacy to improve the accessibility.
Thank you.