My Leadership in Action project was carried out with Cambridgeshire Deaf Association (CDA), a charity supporting Deaf people and people with hearing loss across Cambridgeshire and Peterborough. The project grew out of an earlier placement I had arranged with CDA and a conversation about whether there was any additional work I could usefully contribute.
The idea we eventually settled on was to develop a professional-facing information and signposting resource. CDA already provides a fairly wide range of services, but someone working in healthcare, social care or another community setting may not necessarily know what those services are, when they might be relevant, or how to direct someone towards them. Thus the aim was to make the referral system easier for professionals to understand and use.
Before working properly on the pack, I spent some time seeing what CDA actually does. I attended a Hearing Aid Maintenance session, where I watched staff replace tubing, change batteries, clean hearing aids and deal with simple problems such as blockages or hardened tubing. These were not medically complicated interventions, but it quickly became obvious that their effect could be much larger than their technical complexity suggested. Something as simple as a blocked tube could noticeably affect somebody’s ability to communicate. I also began to see the role CDA plays alongside formal healthcare. Audiology can assess hearing and provide a hearing aid, but that device still has to function in everyday life, and relatively minor practical problems can undermine its usefulness.
I also attended a Deaf Community Drop-in. That was quite different. People were using BSL, catching up with one another and spending time in a setting where Deaf communication was normal rather than something that needed to be accommodated. One regular attendee described CDA less as a formal service than as somewhere she could communicate naturally and meet other people without constantly adapting herself to a hearing environment. That conversation stayed with me because it made CDA’s role feel much broader than a collection of individual services.
These experiences also helped confirm the basic idea behind the project. CDA already had useful services and existing referral routes. The problem I was interested in was how easily somebody outside the organisation could understand them. Even an effective voluntary-sector service may fail to reach people who are unaware that it exists, thus signposting from healthcare could genuinely matter.
My original objectives were to understand CDA’s services and likely professional audiences, produce an outline of the resource, develop a full draft including quick-reference material, revise it with CDA, and complete a final version that could be handed over. Most of those aims were achieved.
I began by reviewing CDA’s existing information and working out how the different services fitted together. The resource gradually developed around the questions I thought a busy professional would actually ask: what does CDA do, when might it be useful, which service might be relevant, and how does someone make contact or refer? I also included a short section on communication, partly because this was one area where my medical background was directly relevant.
The final version included an overview of CDA, a service-by-service signposting guide, a quick-reference section, referral and contact information, some common scenarios, and a short FAQ. Some things that I had originally imagined as separate outputs worked better as parts of the same document, so the final product was slightly more consolidated than the plan on paper. The overall idea, however, remained much the same.
One part of the project that changed more substantially was BSL. I had initially intended to spend a meaningful amount of time learning basic BSL alongside the main project. I did begin learning, but progress was slower than I had expected. During the Deaf Community Drop-in, my limited BSL meant that I sometimes struggled to join conversations and had to rely on basic signs, gesture, writing and help from other people. Even though that was only a brief experience in a very supportive environment, it did give me a much more concrete sense of the effort involved when the dominant form of communication is not naturally accessible to you.
At the same time, CDA staff made the fairly practical point that the project itself did not depend on my becoming conversational in BSL. The information pack was aimed mainly at professionals, and if I needed to communicate with a service user in more depth, interpretation was available. I therefore spent less time than originally planned on BSL and concentrated more heavily on the resource itself. I still gained some understanding of BSL and Deaf communication, but I also became more realistic about what I could usefully learn in a limited period and where my own skills were most relevant.
The more difficult part of evaluating the project is what happened after the initial enthusiasm. CDA had originally been quite positive about the idea, particularly because signposting, access to support and communications were already areas they were working on. As the summer went on, however, their engagement became more limite, and I do not know whether the final resource will eventually be adopted or circulated.
That means the objective of developing the resource iteratively with CDA and seeing it move towards implementation is only partially achieved.
An organisation can think something is useful while also having other priorities, limited staff time or simply less urgency around it than I do.
The project itself was fairly quiet and self-directed. Much of the work involved reading, organising information, refining wording and thinking about what would actually be useful to someone encountering CDA for the first time. What I produced was a professional-facing resource based on CDA’s existing services and signposting arrangements, together with a much better understanding of how voluntary organisations can complement formal healthcare.