IN DEPTH ‘‘
Yasir Haniff, Library Assistant at Frimley Health Foundation Trust.
Most people who are deaf or have hearing loss have felt stressed at work because of the barriers they experience due to their hearing loss.
Practical solutions builds work place improvements
CILIP’s Disability Network held its first awards to celebrate the good work that is taking place in library, information and knowledge settings to improve the lives of staff and users with disabilities. Here, Accessibility Award (in memory of Lynne Mackie) winner Yasir Haniff discusses his efforts to create a deaf-friendly working environment.
OUR library team at Wexham Park Hospital part of Frimley Health Foundation Trust, are a dedicated team who are passionate about supporting the academic and research needs of Trust staff and students.
We provide comprehensive resources, study and wellbeing spaces and expert guidance to our users. I am the library assistant, and the rest of the team consists of a librarian and a library manager. We also work with the library team at Frimley Park Hospital.
I am the first point for all library enquiries whether they are in person, via email or over the telephone. I am profoundly deaf and have been so since the age of five. I wear a cochlear implant device to help me to hear and I am also a mentor for Advanced Bionics, a cochlear implant manufacturer, guiding and supporting mentees going through the cochlear implant process. I do not use sign language and rely on a combination of hearing and lip-reading. When I joined the Trust, while I was getting used to my surroundings and working with new people, I was noticing that I was struggling to hear my colleagues at times due to the lack of deaf awareness and the working environment. At my previous job, I worked in a similar role and my colleagues there adapted to my communication needs, having the experience of working with a deaf person as when I started working there, I had no hearing. The envi- ronment was also more suitable for a deaf person, for example, it had carpeted floors and contained areas with walls to help with sound quality. The telephone was a VOIP device which has superior sound quality over the standard telephone I was using when I joined Frimley Health. Other examples
42 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
included team meetings that were difficult for me to follow or having to ask people to repeat what they were saying either because they were unaware of my communication needs or because of the presence of background noise. I had also noticed that there are other members of the Trust who were deaf or hard of hearing.
In terms of finding a solution, I had to look at how to manage situations as they arise and still do so today. I had to mention my communication needs with my colleagues including getting my attention before speaking to me, facing me at all times while talking to me, eliminating any background noise that was hindering conversation, speaking normally and clearly and not whispering, replacing the telephone with a VOIP phone, educating speakers and col- leagues at workshops and conferences about how I use a wireless microphone for hearing over distance and in noise, and even how I position myself when people are speaking to me. These are just a few solu- tions and they are situation dependent. People often forget how to be deaf aware, especially if they do not meet deaf people on a day-to-day basis. The Frimley Health Library team were in the process of organis- ing an education away-day and I thought it would be ideal to hold a session on deaf awareness. I wanted to make the session interesting, fun and interactive. I started with telling my life story up to now living with deafness, the challenges I faced and how I tried to overcome them – all through school, living in a different country, through to university and employment and how I mentor people who want to hear with a cochlear implant. I also mentioned how I navigate through the healthcare system. I talked about the differences of deaf people
Summer 2025
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