Presenting Complaint

by Lizzie

Hi I’m Lizzie! I was very excited when I first heard about this project as learning languages is something I always enjoyed at school, and after reading a bit into the difficulties deaf people face in healthcare situations I thought even just a group of us being able to use basic BSL may help a handful of patients in the future and if that’s all we achieve that would be great, although hopefully we can raise awareness to a wider group of students and healthcare professionals. 

I taught the presenting complaint section of the history, this only really comprises of asking the patient why they are at the doctors.  This initial question was very easy to learn in sign language, but then I very quickly realized that it meant nothing being able to ask patients questions if you can’t understand their response.  With such an open question every patient that comes in will have a different response, making me quickly realize how difficult it must be to both learn sign language but also communicate complicated medical problems to those with limited sign language understanding or none at all.

I found the hardest part wasn’t teaching myself the sign language, but finding a way to teach the rest of the group and write up a hand out that we can use to refresh our memories later on.  We have all been using the same online course to work our way through Level 1 and it mostly comprises of videos of someone signing with subtitles.  This along with the online video dictionary I used to learn this section of the history have shown that using videos is probably the easiest way of learning, therefore to teach it I just signed what I had learnt with everyone copying.  We then practiced in pairs in order to really consolidate what we had learnt and start to feel more comfortable with the order of signs and getting faster, however we still found ourselves talking a lot to try and clarify certain signs.  The process has really highlighted some of the difficulties people who are not born deaf must face when learning sign language, especially when you consider that for one word there may be five different signs you could use.