Hearing Impaired Podiatry Patients' Experiences of Receiving Healthcare
Citation
Carson, K. (2016) Hearing Impaired Podiatry Patients'
Experiences of Receiving Healthcare, no. 127.
Abstract
Few Podiatrists are trained to assist in communication with hearing impaired patients.
However, hearing impaired patients may constitute the bulk of patients seen when
treating an elderly population. Keogh (2015) opines that over ten million adults in
the UK have hearing loss, i.e. one in six of the population, and hearing loss will
continue to be an even bigger challenge as the number of old people increases.
It is vital that the hearing impaired have accurate communication in their healthcare
because the conveyance of essential information could be potentially life-saving.
Podiatrists have to be registered with the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) in the UK, and Van der Gaag (2015) postulates that the HCPC wants to place more emphasis on partnership with patients and service users, and foregrounded the importance of attributes such as empathy and compassion in patient care.
Empathy and compassion is required to fully comprehend the experiences of the
hearing impaired. This study has aimed to highlight and understand the experiences
of the hearing impaired who use hearing aids and regularly access podiatric
healthcare. Six patients over the age of eighteen who use hearing aids and the
services of a private podiatrist have been invited to take part in semi-structured
interviews with the principal researcher. Their responses have been entered on to a
laptop computer. The typed interview has been returned to the participant for their
views, and whether they would like to add or change anything thereby attempting to
achieve triangulation. The responses have then been analysed as per the
suggestions of Finlay (2011) as a phenomenological approach with a hermeneutic
focus. This means the aim is to evoke lived experience through the explicit
involvement of interpretation (appendix 1).
The results of the interviews demonstrated that the hearing impaired participants did
experience difficulties in communication during their podiatric and other healthcare.
The conclusions include education of the podiatrist in understanding problems of the
hearing impaired, and practical suggestions to help the hearing impaired in their
interaction with the podiatrist and their team.