On Friday, I met the final two parents of my Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) group, I call it my ‘Parent Involvement Group’ because these wonderful people are not patients, but just as important.
Please meet Juliet (top left) and Hannah (bottom). Very kindly, they both gave me two hours of their time to share their lived experiences as hearing parents to deaf (and hearing) children.
Juliet and Hannah both live in Bristol and run the Bristol Deaf Children’s Society. They have also worked together for many years to bring the ‘NDCS Parent to Parent Support Scheme’ to realisation. The scheme is funded by the NDCS and is currently being piloted in Bristol. It sounds amazing and as the title suggests, aims to partner parents who have recently found out their child is deaf with a parent of a deaf child who is a little further along in their journey.
In my December 2020 parent involvement meeting, parents discussed how valuable it was to share stories, to hear each other’s experiences, to feel as though they were all on the same path… So the work Hannah and Juliet have been doing is much needed. I’m really looking forward to learning more about it.
In a follow-up post, I’m going to be pulling out some key themes from my parent discussions. There is so much that I/we can learn from them and I’m so pleased to have all 10 parents on board.