The development of a standard rating scale to illuminate a service user'S communication strengths and challenges: Working with expert practitioners and service users in an adult deaf mental health setting.
- Autores: Lindsey Gagan, Kim Williams
- Localización: International Journal on Mental Health and Deafness, ISSN 2226-3462, Vol. 5, Nº. 1, 2021
- Idioma: inglés
- Enlaces
-
Resumen
The adoption of a standardised communication rating scale across mental health services for deaf people offers several potential benefits: highlighting where communication support and adaptations are needed to optimise interventions and engagement in recovery for the individual, more consistent monitoring of a person’s communication skills over time, facilitating the transfer of information as a person moves between services, and gathering consistent, comparable information about service user populations.
In July 2017, the lack of such a rating scale in the United Kingdom was identified as a need by NHS England (an executive public body of the Department of Health and Social Care which oversees the budget, planning, delivery and day-to-day operation of commissioning in the National Health Service in England). The Communication Sunburst (hereafter referred to as The Sunburst) was developed in response as a functional, observation based, multi-disciplinary assessment tool which captures an overview of a person’s current communication skills in a visual format.
Initial consultation achieved broad consensus on the clinical value of such a tool, the domains identified, the visual format and the rating scale. Training was then delivered at several locations across England and guidance produced in both an English booklet and British Sign Language (BSL) disk. (The possibility of establishing the Sunburst as an online tool was explored but not achievable within available resources at the time).
A pilot phase followed across inpatient and some community mental health settings for deaf adults in England. Standard adoption of The Sunburst was tied to targets linked to funding incentives for inpatient services.
Feedback to date on the tool’s usefulness has been favourable and The Sunburst will be refined further with pilot sites.
