Chamari Weeraratne

Communicating Medicine Instructions to Hearing Disabled Consumers: Overcoming Communication Barriers Chamari Weeraratne

Hearing disabled persons face many problems in the healthcare sector due to communication barriers. To promote safe and effective use of medicine among them, it is necessary to use methods that are comprehensible to them in conveying medicine related instructions. This book is based on a research carried out among hearing disabled people in Sri Lanka, with the intention of exploring methods to overcome communication barriers between them and healthcare professionals. In this research, it was checked how they comprehend written instructions on simple drug regimens and verbal instructions by lip reading. As a novel method, pictorial labels were developed using pictograms to convey instructions on several basic drug regimens and their comprehensibility was validated among hearing disabled persons.