You’re a clinician, probably an audiologist, and you would frankly rather be anywhere but here. This is a meeting between you and the parents of a newborn child who has been screened for hearing impairment and the news you must share is not good. You can’t be sure how the parents will deal with the confirmation that their new baby is profoundly deaf and always will be. Management Futures Senior Consultant Sandra Grealy has the ideal programme for you.

This is a comparatively new situation for you. Previously you’d handle encounters with parents whose children might well be months or even years old when the confirmation of deafness came, and so were to some degree prepared for the news. The NHS Newborn Hearing Screening Programme changes everything. You now get the medical diagnosis very early, which means you must break the news to parents much earlier too.

The screening of newborn babies was introduced precisely because deafness in the children too often went undetected until later – sometimes much later – when anxious parents finally brought their concerns to their family doctors’ attention, by which time many early treatment and training options may have been lost for the child.

So this meeting with the parents is about more than the transmission of a diagnosis, more than a matter of helping them through a difficult moment. This is about helping families to be a wholly positive influence on their children’s futures where their fears or negativism can so easily set them on the wrong path.

Though 90% of deaf children are born to hearing parents, 10% are going to be deaf themselves. Some parents will accept and adapt to the unwelcome news while some will be in stubborn denial of it. Some will face up to the implications of life with a deaf child, others will shy away from the daily tasks involved in managing the condition. Some will themselves be challenging individuals with personality traits that could impede a child’s progress. Others, again, will be over-compliant or just too plain anxious to perform their role.

Early warning

Once the screening programme developed by Professor Adrian Davis and his team became a clinical reality, the pressing need was for a family ‘early warning’ system. The National Deaf Children’s Society (NDCS) were consulted. They knew the issues first-hand. They knew that all parents were not the same, that the scenarios any audiologist, paediatrician or teacher for the deaf might encounter can vary wildly, practically and psychologically.

To Gwen Carr of NDCS and Professor Davis, it was indeed the idea of ‘role’ that suggested the way forward. The scenario was always going to involve one clinician in a difficult but absolutely crucial first interaction with one or two parents and the way to prepare for that suggested some form of ‘role play’ training. They commissioned Management Futures to adapt the principle of their proven training programmes for leaders or practitioners in a variety of other commercial and public sector fields, a method based on the use of professional actors in simulation exercises.

Workshop sessions with the actors and clinicians have already been run and the lessons learned built into a programme called Supporting & Empowering Families Through Effective Communication. The first of the resulting two-day sessions have been held this May in Manchester and London with further sessions planned.

Why actors?

Explaining a newborn child’s deafness in a positive and constructive way to its parents is an event where calm medical information can get submerged in an ocean of turbulent emotion. Role play helps you learn how to swim in those currents. The actors help you to measure your responses so that they become constructively useful to the family.

And why you?

Sit in on this set of interactive scenarios and somehow, out of the give-and-take of simulated conversations, your effective listening skills and approach to communicating should be enhanced; you’ll understand parents’ perceptions of the screening and diagnosis information whatever attitudes, preconceptions or stereotypes they bring with them; and be better able to support their needs by working to their agenda and timing. Actors can prepare you for all that.

Screening a child for deafness directly after birth enhances its lifetime development chances. Communicating that diagnosis positively with the parents further enhances the child’s chances. A best practice that serves everyone involved depends on the steady refinement of screening techniques and of clinicians’ communication skills. Your participation is very much part of that advance because this truly is a work in progress.

For full information on the Management Futures Supporting & Empowering Families Through Effective Communication role play sessions, contact Sandra Grealy on 020 7242 4030.