Healthcare Compliance Perspective:
The Compliance Officer will review the policies and procedures regarding the assessment of the need and the provision of auxiliary aids and services for persons who are deaf or hard of hearing with the Compliance Committee. Staff will be educated regarding communication with residents who are deaf or hard of hearing. Audits will be performed to ensure that residents with hearing disabilities have been identified and assessed and that a list of qualified interpreters has been developed and is available.
The Southwest Fair Housing Council (SFHC), recently filed a federal lawsuit against 14 or more assisted-living and nursing centers alleging they discriminate against prospective residents who are deaf. The suit is the result of a two-year investigation using undercover testers who were used by the SFHC to contact large centers in Tucson and Phoenix seeking placement for their fictitious, deaf grandfather.
The testers made inquiries in person, by phone and e-mail. Through these inquiries, they asked specific questions about whether the centers had access to qualified, American Sign Language interpreters along with other aids to help their deaf grandfather communicate successfully. They expressed specific concern about the need to provide communication assistance with medical needs and involved paperwork.
In order to make sure that the answers the testers were receiving were representative of the centers’ policies, the responses to the testers’ inquiries were carefully recorded and included multiple contacts with the centers over several months.
The answers, according to the lawsuit, assert that the employees at the centers almost every time responded that they “could not or would not offer interpreters.” Testers were told the deaf resident could provide their own interpreters, use writing or lip-reading to communicate with staff.
The executive director of SFHC put it this way, “A lot of what we heard was basically flat-out refusals to make any accommodations. In a lot of these instances, there wasn’t even a back-and-forth.”
