Monday 1, December 2025

Kate started the meeting by welcoming all members to our first online meeting and making sure everyone was happy with using Teams and had live captions switched on. 

As a reminder, Kate briefly outlined what ALL_EARS@UoS is all about: 

Our goal is to create partnerships between researchers and people with lived experience of deafness and hearing loss.

Through these partnerships, we aim to:

1. Inform and prioritise the research that gets done.
2. Drive research outcomes that make a positive difference for deaf and hard of hearing people and their families. 
3. Empower people to seek out the healthcare they need for their hearing loss or deafness. 

The meeting objectives were to:

1. Discuss deaf awareness and our aim to co-produce a useful resource. 
2. Discuss the ideal format and content for our online meetings.

Discussion 1: Building a co-produced deaf awareness resource  

Kate outlined the idea to co-produce a deaf awareness resource which initially came from Sue Boswell.  

Aim: To co-produce a deaf awareness resource which can be used in

• Teaching (Undergraduate – Medicine, Audiology…)
• Training (workplace, healthcare professionals…)
• Schools 
• Healthcare 

Kate discussed a survey that was carried out by a multidisciplinary working group of patients, clinicians, researchers and charity representatives which aimed to investigate accessibility, communication and deaf awareness within the UK NHS. 

Next, we had a great discussion about the topic of deaf awareness. The following questions were given as a prompt: 

• What do you think of deaf awareness?
• What do people not understand or appreciate about deafness?
• Do you have any personal experiences you would like to share?
• What is one thing people should do or remember? (if it is only one thing, the main /most important thing) 

Group members shared their experiences and presented great ideas for ways we could improve deaf awareness and what a resource might look like. The next steps are to set up a working group to co-develop a resource. 

Before we finished the meeting, Kate highlighted that we want to hear from the group how they would like the online meetings to be run and what topics they would like us to discuss. 

Kate closed the meeting and thanked everyone for joining and engaging in such a great discussion. 

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