Bridge Hampton – Men’s Low Secure and Deaf Mental Health

The hospital team includes both Deaf and hearing professionals who provide expertise and resources to enable service users with complex communication needs who may have a mental illness, learning disability or personality disorder to participate safely and as fully as possible in their care and achieve outcomes to support their discharge from hospital.

All of our Mental Health and Deafness services use a recovery model and support each service user to achieve realistic goals by:

• Establishing and understanding their communication style, how it has developed and the factors that are likely to impact upon communication and behaviour
• Determining what potential a person has to improve communication and identify strategies
• Developing highly individualised and accessible packages of care, in line with the All About Me Deaf Recovery Package
• Supporting differential diagnosis

We offer a specialist interpreter service to facilitate communication between service users who are Deaf, and other hearing members of their extended care team.

“I would like to commend your Interpreting Department for the amazing work that they do. We have never seen such excellent work in the whole country.”CQC lead inspector, Bury

A highly specialised multi-disciplinary team supports individuals in Bridge Hampton and care and treatment programmes are very much tailored to the individual’s needs. DBT is used as a treatment programme within the ward and it is a bilingual community where all staff are trained in British Sign Language. There are also both deaf and hearing members of staff on the ward.

Our service has received national recognition for its pioneering work in making recovery and outcome focused work meaningful and accessible. All staff receive Deaf Awareness Training and are supported to access British Sign Language (BSL) classes.

Our innovation initiatives:

• Recovery College
• National Service User Awards
• Collaborative project with Crisis Prevention Institute on MAPA training for Deaf learners
• People’s Council meetings
• Mental Health Act code of practice Easy Read adaptation in association with NHS England
• Personalised visual adaptations for Deaf service users with additional learning disabilities and complex needs
• Care plans recorded in BSL film format or other formats meaningful to the individual
• All About Me Deaf Recovery package

All therapeutic programmes are adapted and delivered to make them meaningful and accessible based on individual language need. Service users have won national awards for service user involvement projects and coproduced the award-winning All About Me Deaf recovery package.

Cygnet Hospital Bury is a major employer of Deaf staff which is vital to providing accessible and quality services. Our highly experienced and skilled interpreting team alongside a Deaf communication and translation specialist, support high quality care.