Partnership will increase Deaf community’s access to quality health and mental-health care

Chicago—The Michael Reese Health Trust has made a $450,000 grant to fund an innovative partnership with Chicago’s Deaf community and Chicago area’s leading providers of health services for deaf individuals: Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center and Sinai Health System. The three-year project will draw on the two institutions’ relationships with the Deaf community and their collective expertise to help individuals who are deaf improve their own health and also to assist health-care providers improve the quality of the care and services they deliver to those individuals.

“Chicago’s Deaf population has unique needs related to accessing quality health and mental-health care,” said Elizabeth Lee, Senior Program Officer at the Michael Reese Health Trust. “Illinois Masonic and Sinai have the experience and the infrastructure to address those needs. We share their commitment to this population and to their strategy of working with individual members of the population and organizations that serve it to continuously improve access and quality.”

Illinois Masonic and Sinai have already developed and are now pilot testing a health-education program in American Sign Language for consumers who are deaf that will be implemented in partnership with other Chicago-area organizations that serve the Deaf. The grantees are also working to enhance best-practice guidelines related to Deaf-patient access to care, and to expand the dissemination of those guidelines across their respective health systems’ hospitals and other sites of care.

“There are an estimated 11,000-15,000 individuals in the Chicago area who are culturally deaf, which means that are most likely to communicate in American Sign Language and not be fluent in other languages,” said Advocate Charitable Foundation’s Barbara Giloth, Dr.P.H., who wrote the proposal for the partnership. “It’s essential to use American Sign Language to ensure understanding of concepts important for self-care, maintaining health, and following chronic care treatment regimens. It’s also essential that caregivers be educated about the limitations of lip reading and even note writing when trying to communicate with patients who are deaf.”

Advocate Health Care is Illinois’ largest health-care provider, with 200 sites of care across the Chicago area, including Illinois Masonic Medical Center. Sinai Health System includes Mount Sinai Health System, Sinai Children’s Hospital, and Schwab Rehabilitation. The Michael Reese Health Trust seeks to improve the health of people in Chicago's metropolitan communities through effective grantmaking in health care, health education and health research.

Click here to learn more about the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing program at Illinois Masonic.