Cranial Nerve Teaching

Hi! I’m Rachel, and I did the first half of the cranial nerve exam teaching.

I have a part time job at a cinema and as such have had several interactions with BSL users in a customer facing environment. Some of these are easy enough to handle without any signing ability on my part as the customers are excellent at lip reading and are happy to point at what it is they want, however anything outside of normal service is difficult. There have been several occasions where I couldn’t tell what a customer was trying to explain to me – I felt awful that I didn’t know what was going on or how to help them. Despite these interactions, I’ve never found myself with the time to learn BSL so when this project was proposed I was excited at the opportunity to learn with others and work towards a goal. While we may not be at the level we had initially hoped we would be, I have really enjoyed learning sign language and hope that I will be of more use to customers patients.

BSL is also important outside of medicine, an example of this being a particularly striking conversation with a customer. They were talking to the staff after their film who was deaf and visually impaired about how important the film they had just watched was to them but that she found it hard to follow as she was deaf and visually impaired. I told her about subtitled screenings that we run twice a week and she pointed out that as she was visually impaired, she couldn’t follow subtitles and that it would be better if we ran screenings with a BSL interpreter. This example of us thinking we had made helpful accommodations and then finding out that actually our efforts fall below the bar was reflected in the project by John’s comments on things we had thought would be helpful for patients but actually weren’t. It reiterated that patients themselves often know what works best for them and that our focus going forward should be what accommodations do they think would be beneficial and how can we incorporate these into practice.

I found the teaching difficult as I was not able to translate the sections properly into BSL (this is explored in more detail in my blog post “Preparing for Teaching”), but in the end managed to produce something I felt was sufficient to get the message across. I really enjoyed the experience of teaching and didn’t find it too challenging as I have lots of experience training people through work. The project has been really interesting and exciting and I hope that what I have learnt will be useful in my future practice.