My great-grandmother was deaf (caused by the measles she had when she was seven), and I was taught from a young age to tap her (gently!) to let her know I’d arrived, not to look away when I was speaking to her, and to talk so that she could lip-read. There was always another grown-up around to help me if I got stuck, and pen and paper was never far away if that didn’t work (once I was old enough to write).

 

Communicating differently with her didn’t seem like a particularly big deal; that was just how you talked to great-granny. When she started having problems with her sight, too, chatting was harder, but we were still able to communicate. So, without realising it, I was communicating with a deafblind older person. 

 

One of my jobs was as a mental health advice worker (with a legal focus), and I remember an older woman who talked to me about the pleasure she had always got from listening to classical music, particularly as she lost her sight. She coped well with her sight loss, and she’d often ask me to read her post to her. But when her hearing started to deteriorate, she really felt the loss of the music and was very sad. I wish I’d known then about the deafblind guidance, what help and support she might have been legally entitled to, and been able to help her ask for an assessment, if she’d wanted one. 

 

I think realising that deafblind doesn’t mean completely deaf and completely blind is a light bulb moment for many people. It’s why we often don’t use the word deafblind when we talk about older people, we say things like “older people who have problems with their sight and hearing” instead. Our research project about the needs of older people in care homes, for example, showed that people in our research project didn’t think of themselves as deafblind and neither did the people who worked in the care homes.

 

I sit on the Management Group of the Campaign to End Loneliness for Sense. I was keen that Sense got involved with the Campaign, because we know that if older people with hearing and sight loss don’t have the right support, they can feel acutely lonely. Now that we know of the health dangers of loneliness too, it makes it doubly important that older people with hearing and sight loss have enough support to help them have a reasonable quality of life.  

 

So, although this isn’t needed just for this week, but maybe this week is a chance for all of us to think about two things – whether or not some of the older people we might know (or support, or work with), might have problems with their hearing and sight; and what could we do to help, or support them, better.