Why do deaf people experience stress over visiting a doctor?

Many Deaf people do experience frustration and stress from visiting the doctor due to the communication barriers, because of this Deaf people desire is to able to go to their local GP and explain their problem, not to entangled with their health.

In contrast, the specific issues Deaf people may encounter are lack of communication barriers, poor services, misdiagnosis, lack of understanding medical condition, interpreting, access to info, health literacy and Deaf awareness. To able to understand this is an occurrence, according to Fellinger et al stated: “Deafness is associated with large heterogeneity in cognitive, social, and emotional development”. This makes Deaf people feel more cautious about their mental health, which they are entitled to see a professional about their concern. Whether they are receiving the services that they are entitled to be something to consider about. If the NHS is deaf aware, they would easily identify the issues and to obtain some quick changes, so that their system will work adequately.

According to Barnett et al, “Inequality in health and health care have increasingly become an area for concern and action for public health professionals, clinicians, policymakers and communities”.

This illustrates the inequality in health and health care is significant to enable Deaf people to have access to healthcare. Furthermore, found that in this age of internet and smartphones, 45% of Deaf sign language users can still only make an appointment for themselves by walking into their doctor’s surgery. This may be a different way to get an appointment with their doctors; is it still important to have an interpreter there, so they would not have any complication in making an appointment.