Hearing difficulties & loneliness

A staggering nine million people in this country are believed to have hearing difficulties.

It is thought that 4 million use hearing aids and another 4 million probably ought to do so – at least 50,000 are profoundly deaf and 23,000 blind-deaf.

For many older people their increasing years comes with some form of hearing difficulty which, as we know, can lead on to problems caused by social isolation and loneliness.

Yet with modern technology there are now many ways to both improve hearing and to communicate – amongst them the BT Text Relay Service, previously known as Type Talk.

This amazing service, which automatically applies a discount to your calls using the service is in operation throughout the year and can be accessed by textphone users and those with conventional telephones by entering either 18001 or 18002 prior to calling the person you want to communicate with.

The Relay handles around 40,000 calls a week in complete confidence and 2 million calls a year…no records are kept and operators are shielded from their colleagues and have to hand over anything they could communicate with prior to starting work.

Until this week I was completely unaware that it existed, and neither had I given much thought to how people with hearing difficulties communicate, until attending a talk by Cornwall-based deaf communications consultant Mark Cunliffe.

I’d recommend him to any organisation involved in communication where people do have, or might have, hearing difficulties. He delivers his talk peppered with humour yet at the same time is very thought provoking.

Mark also offers Deaf awareness training, Sign Language training as well as Telecoms training and can review a company's services and see how it can be improved to Deaf and hard of hearing people.
Mark can be contacted by email at   -  mark_lcunliffe@hotmail.com

I’ve take the liberty of cutting and pasting the following about him ….

Mark Cunliffe has been profoundly deaf since the age of 6. He attended the Mary Hare Grammar school for deaf people and was involved in the deaf community in the North West of England before moving to Cornwall. He is an experienced Deaf and Disability Awareness trainer and has fluent Sign Language skills being qualified to stage III BSL.
Mark’s employment background is varied, ranging from working in hotels as a front of House Manager to being employed by the RNID as a Social Worker. For the last 9 years Mark has been an Outreach Coordinator at the National Telephone Relay Service, Typetalk (now known as UK’s Text Relay service) where he was working on a daily basis with deaf, deafened and speech impaired customers, helping them to use their Textphones and the Text Relay (formerly known as Typetalk). Additionally, Mark has delivered awareness training to many organisations in the correct way to deal with calls via the telephone network using both the Text Relay service (Typetalk) and their company Minicoms.

http://www.communicationsaccessconsultants.co.uk/ourteam.php