American Sign Language Services at Saint Anne's Hospital
American Sign Language Interpreter Services
Saint Anne's Hospital is working to improve the health care experience for our deaf, hard of hearing, and deaf-blind patients and visitors through strategic expansion of equivalent access resources. The following is a list of "best practice" projects in-progress across our system.
NexTalk Video Relay Interpretation (VRI) System
Saint Anne's Hospital has installed NexTalk VRI systems to ensure that any patient with a sign language communication need is able to engage his or her health care provider team without delay whenever in-person sign language Interpreters are not available. This portable communication technology also allows deaf and hard of hearing family members and friends to fully participate in the hospital visits of hearing patients if requested by the patient. The NexTalk system is both H323 and TTY compatible.
Videophones
Saint Anne's Hospital is expanding on-site VRI resources with dedicated videophones for the use of our outpatients and visitors. Once deployed, this new technology will ensure our NexTalk systems are always available for inpatient and emergency clinical care while ensuring that other persons on-site with a need for VRI service are able to stay in communication with friends and loved ones. Just as with NexTalk, videophone devices are H323 and TTY compatible.
Language Identification Cards
Saint Anne's Hospital has offered language identification cards called iSpeak cards to patients requiring spoken language interpretation for several years. Such resources make it much easier for patients to ensure their language needs are correctly identified and appropriately met. Encouraged by positive feedback from this prior initiative, Saint Anne's is now developing online access cards for deaf, hard of hearing, and visually limited patients. Our resources are already available for preliminary viewing, and we are working with our web development team to format entered information into an identification card our patients can print out on their home computers to carry with them everywhere. Stay tuned!
Health Education Resources
Saint Anne's Hospital believes that ensuring our patients are fully informed of the risks and benefits of complex procedures and tests is the best possible way to ensure that complications are minimized and outcomes improved. Consequently, we are researching ASL education video content to be hosted and/or linked on this site for the use of our patients. All suggestions for possible resources are welcome!
DeafMD
DeafMD is an innovative website providing accurate, concise, and valuable health information in American Sign Language to the Deaf & Hard of Hearing population. Using health information created by two trustworthy and unbiased government sources—the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, DeafMD's team of healthcare providers, linguists, and educators translates this complex information into ASL.