A section of legislators have tasked Government to ensure that sign language is included in the curriculum for medical workers, in order to protect privacy of patients.
The appeal was made by Flavia Nabagabe (Kassanda DWR) while reacting to a statement by Minister of State for Disabilities, Hellen Asamo ahead of the commemoration of the International Deaf Awareness Week.
Nabagabe said there is need for Government to address the issue of healthcare accessibility for deaf people especially when they go to health facilities where there are no interpreters, “Their right to privacy is violated because you can’t be able to go into details of what their ailments are because they need to have their interpreters so I would recommend that governments trains all in sign language so that these people can easily talk to them without having a second person listen to their issues.”
The Luwero DWR, Brenda Nabukenya asked Parliament not to leave out the elderly while dealing with issues of the hearing loss among the elderly arguing, “Loss of hearing isn’t only limited to people who are born deaf, while people age, they also get into that stage of hearing loss and I understand that accessing hearing aids in this country is quite expensive, and I think as we debate about disability, we should put this in mind that at a certain stage, we should also think about Ugandans who are aging because we are all candidates towards that so that we limit it to only the young.”
Minister Asamo replied, “Recently, in the Ministry of Health, they used to train some of the workers, the challenge with sign language when you don’t practice then you lose it. And I think this is something we are going to take on for advocacy.”
The International Deaf Awareness week an initiative by the world federation of the deaf and was first celebrated in 1958 in Rome Italy and Uganda has been celebrating the event for the last 16years and the celebrations are intended to celebrate the human rights of the deaf.
According to the 2014 Uganda National Housing and Population Survey, there were over 1,083,649 deaf people in Uganda, but from 2014, the number has increased to 1,290,000 of the population.
In 2012, the World Health Organisation (WHO) released new estimates on the magnitude of disabling hearing loss that estimates that there are 360 million persons in the world with disabling hearing loss, and of these, 328 million are adults (183 million males, 145 million females) while 32 million are children. Sub Saharan Africa, a region Uganda falls has 6.8million deaf children and 17million adults.
However, a section of MPs like Muwanga Kivumbi (Butambala County) said the statement by Government fell short on revealing how much money will be spent on the main commemoration day and how much is required to address the special needs for this category.
He said, “I have looked through this report and typical of government, the Minister should be able to tell us on how much money they spend on these days because sometimes budgets of these agencies are blown on functions. The statement should have spoken to the financial needs in actual figures on how to alleviate this situation and ask parliament for action. When you come to the budgeting process, this report should have informed us of your needs.”
According to experts, disabling hearing loss refers to hearing loss greater than 40 dB in the better hearing ear in adults (15 years or older) and greater than 30 dB in the better hearing ear in children (0 to 14 years).
It is a good opinion.