The BSL Advisory Board is an advisory board that represents the Deaf community, advises government departments on implementation of the BSL Act 2022, and works to campaign to remove barriers for deaf people.
Today, the BSL Advisory Board published its Health and Social Care Report 2025. The Report has been two years in the making, highlights the experiences of people who are deaf or have hearing loss in relation to health and social care, and contains detailed policy recommendations.
To create the Report, the Board led a subgroup focused on collecting evidence and lived experience from more than 60 different organisations, professionals and individual experts, as well as carers and deaf and deafblind people.
Responding to the report, Crystal Rolfe, Director of Strategy at RNID, said:
Deaf and deafblind people continue to face numerous barriers when accessing health and social care services. These barriers prevent people from understanding important information, managing their own health, and participating in decisions about treatment. This is unacceptable.
The BSL Advisory Board Report shines a spotlight on these experiences and sets out clear, evidence-based recommendations for change. Implementing these recommendations would represent a major step towards equality in health and social care and we urge the Government to act on them without delay.
RNID’s own research, published in our Still Ignored report, confirms that unequal access to healthcare is a long-standing and systemic issue – despite the obligation on healthcare to ensure their services are accessible. This failure is leaving millions of people in the dark about their own health, with devastating consequences. People who are deaf or have hearing loss should have access to safe and equitable healthcare – nothing less.”
