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RehabilitationThis is not an area which is greatly developed in Britain today. It implies a change in the person's lifestyle and in their job as a result of intervention. Other parts of Europe - notably Germany have much better systems for rehabilitation though it tends to be rather mechanistic. We have carried out some research and development work in this field and can explain a little about the rehabilitation scene for deaf people in Britain. There are a number of Employment Rehabilitation Centres in the UK(26) and 5 assessment centres - ASSET centres. These may have changed in number as there has been a great change in recent times in employment provision. In addition there are a number of centres operated by RNID which cater for deaf people who are in need of rehabilitation. In practice these are mainly basic skills centres where the clients are mostly residential, although in London they would not have to be. In the ERCs there are 700 staff, 25,000 assessments and 14,000 rehabilitation courses each year. The major emphasis is on physical handicap. Only 2 or 3% of those catered for are deaf. This is well below what would have been expected based on the numbers available. deaf people do not know about the services or else they are not able to access them. Our work was to develop a video based system of assessment for deaf people and a video is available of this (VALPAR, 1989). In the course of making this we examined a typical assessment session with the instructors and found a whole range of problems which were predictable - talking when the person was looking away, standing in the light, trying to talk and show at the same time and so on. The results we had fitted very closely with what occurred in the RNID survey "Communication Works". |
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