Elsevier

Nurse Education Today

Volume 33, Issue 9, September 2013, Pages 976-980
Nurse Education Today

An exploration of deaf women's access to mental health nurse education in the United Kingdom

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2012.10.017Get rights and content

Summary

Historically deaf people have been denied access to professional nurse education due to a range of language, communication and ideological barriers. The following study was set in the North of England and draws upon the Western experience and knowledge base of deaf people's experience of access to professional education. The aim of this study was to understand the experiences of the first British Sign Language using deaf qualified nurses before they entered the Pre-registration Diploma in Nursing Programme, during the programme and after the programme as they progressed into professional nursing roles.

The purpose of the study was to gather the nurses' thoughts and feelings about their experiences and to analyse these using thematic analysis within a narrative interpretive tradition against a backdrop of Jurgen Habermas' critical theory and Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy. By drawing out significant themes to structure a deeper understanding of the nurses' unique positions, they offer a model for inclusive education practice that would support deaf people and people from minority groups into nursing and other health care professions.

The signed narratives were video recorded and interpreted into written English transcripts which were then analysed to discover the underlying themes using Boyatzis' (1998) thematic analysis.

The findings are set against an historical and contemporary setting of deaf people in Western society, their experiences of education, health and employment. These unique findings illustrate the significance of an accessible language environment for the nurses, the role of the organisation in ensuring access for the nurses and the impact of barriers to education and the clinical environment.

The implications for education and practice supports the need to analyse the workforce required in deaf services, to scrutinize the access provided, to develop cultural competence skills, enhance the use of additional support mechanisms, generate accessible communities of practice and to draw upon the deaf nurses' own ideas and perspectives to develop accessible provision.

Section snippets

Introduction to the Study

In 1999 a number of lead nurses and senior clinicians from the UK's National Services for Mental health and Deafness came together with the then English National Board for Nursing and Midwifery to establish the first Deaf People's Access to Nursing Project (DPANE). The aim of the project was to address the situation whereby whilst deaf people worked in services for deaf people who were experiencing mental health problems, they tended to work in unqualified positions. The project originators

Methodology and Method

The study's aim was to critically analyse the qualified nurses' experiences before, during and after their nursing programme. The study was completed by the project lead and so at no point was there any attempt to have objective distance. The approach was auto ethnographic (Chang, 2008, Etherington, 2006) and reflexive in nature; more fundamentally it utilised the democratic communication ideal of Habermas (2006) and the emancipatory principles of Paulo Freire, 1970, Freire, 2004 as a

Community of Practice Through a Democratic Communication Ecology

The findings suggests that in education work needs to focus on increasing the competence of teaching and learning staff to manage linguistic diversity in the classroom and to enable staff to develop the shared language and peer support mechanisms associated with CoP within the student population (Christiansen and Bell, 2010). The students and staff will also benefit from language learning opportunities to facilitate the connection between deaf and hearing students in the classroom and the

Conclusion

This study is unique in that it has gathered the thoughts and feelings of the first deaf qualified nurses to register with the NMC. Their thoughts have been analysed the lens of empowerment and ideal communication philosophy in order to frame their voices within a model that others could develop to address the access needs of other diverse communities. There remain barriers to nursing, social work and other health professions for deaf people. The barriers are relatively easy to overcome from a

Acknowledgement

The author is grateful for the support of Dr. Nancy Jane Smith (supervisor), School of Nursing and Midwifery, University of Salford.

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