The latest 'survey' carried out in Bristol on the state of the 'Deaf' situation in the UK
Note: The survey contains many random capitalisations of the term deaf regardless if applicable or even accurate. Other areas of coverage we didn't feel relevant for inclusion because the stats are even wider guesswork, educated? YOU adjudge.
Survey Highlights... LINK
So how many Deaf people are there? Although there are few direct studies of incidence coupled to social studies, which would determine the size of the Deaf population, good estimates can be made on the basis of published work. At its simplest level, we can predict that between one in 2,000 people will have a severe-to-profound hearing loss. A crude projection would give the UK a Deaf population of *25,000 - 30,000 people - a more detailed analysis is given below. The age characteristics of this population should broadly match those of the hearing population - i.e. it is a population whose average age is becoming older.
*These figures suggest the BDA, RNID, and NDCS claims are gross over-exaggerations.
There are several ways in which we can achieve an estimate of the number of *Deaf people in the UK. The first is by using the predicted incidence of deafness at birth and attaching this to all the population statistics for births throughout the years which would apply to the community. This is problematic as it gives only a medical-audiological estimate of hearing loss and does not imply directly, participation in the community by those with a specified hearing loss. That is, measured hearing loss does not equate directly with community membership.
*Deliberate capitalisation to suggest all deaf people they are sign using, The 'D' refers solely to sign using cultural deaf by own claims. Here, the survey applied it across the entire hearing loss spectrum.
The second is to use educational statistics. This is justifiable since *the majority of Deaf Community members will have gone through a school for the deaf. In both cases there are limitations on the extent of the data available and in the accuracy of the information. We have examined statistics more widely but these do not provide a sufficient base for a good estimate. A more effective estimate based on the population change and the year of birth is provided below.
*Not true of Wales, it has no deaf schools.
As a first step official statistics of the EU were consulted. These tend to produce estimates which are way above what we commonly believe to be true: 33% of the adult working population have an impairment and 19% have a disability. Eleven per cent are expected to have a disability related to language, speech, vision or hearing. This reduces finally to a *prediction of hearing problems for 2.65 million people in the UK. This will include those who acquire a hearing loss. Throughout these sets of official statistics the numbers seem to be inflated and unreliable. Source: Eurostat, p137.
*Here, the UK deaf survey ran out of stats and starts using EU ones, then extrapolating them back to the UK, and we aren't even IN Europe.
The Department of Health and Social Security published *the numbers of people registered handicapped in Britain in 1970. Deaf people are covered in this survey.
*Ooops nobody uses the handicap terminology any more, and these quoted stats are over 50 yrs out of date.
Handicap Register (1970). Deaf (Including hard of hearing)
The MRC Institute of Hearing Research based at Nottingham University reports that the incidence of congenital deafness is 1.1 per 1000 live births for hearing losses of >40dB and 1.1 per 4000 for profoundly Deaf (>95dB). This *implies that 880 children will be born in England, Scotland and Wales each year with a moderate hearing impairment (40dB or greater), of whom 220 (25%) will have a profound impairment (>95dB). In addition there is acquired deafness. By the age of 5 years a further 100 children in each birth cohort year will acquire an impairment, about 60 to 80 of whom will have a profound loss. So the total number of children in each year goes up to 980 with about 280-300 of them having a profound loss. This gives a figure on the high side for the Deaf Community - 70,000 mild to profound losses in the UK and 19,000 profoundly deaf.
*Now we resort to guesswork again, and inferring Hard of hearing are the 'Deaf' too.
Incidence Figures
Scottish Office Statistics show the population of Scotland in 1994 as 5.1 million (UK 58.2 m). Of these 2.5 million are males. The relative age distribution is shown in Table 2.5. An estimate provided by the Institute of Hearing Research in Glasgow indicates that 1.1 per thousand live births will have a hearing loss of 40dB and that of these, one quarter will have losses of over 95dB. *We can insert these predictions into the population statistics.
*We can suggest they are BSL using too, (despite the opening statement we just do not know, people would have stopped reading by now).
This gives an overall figure of 1,402 profoundly Deaf people and 5,608 people with a mild to profound hearing loss. *These figures can be multiplied by 11.2 to give the estimate for the UK of 15,702 for profoundly deaf people an 62,809 with a mild to profound hearing loss.
*Ok we rubbished all the RNID/BDA and Scottish stats and claims but....
The figures also imply very small populations in the outlying areas.(So numbers are smaller in rural areas. now they insult our intelligence.)
In these figures, the estimate of the changes in the Deaf population is linked to the general population trends, showing that there has been a *slow increase in the size of the Deaf population. These figures are based on the same proportionate estimates of the general population. A better estimate can be obtained when we can examine the Deaf school figures in terms of the age of the children. Here we can see that there is a general decline in the Deaf school population over the period from 1930. There are several gaps - the war years and also since 1982, when the DfEE stopped collecting statistics by type of problem. As a result we have no up-to-date figures for Deaf children in school. Part of the decline is due to the change in policy, so that more Deaf children are integrated and partly there is better provision of hearing aids and so the partially-hearing children tend not to appear in the statistics any longer. It seems likely that the Deaf Community has become more Deaf over the years although it would be very hard to obtain reliable measures of this.
*Oops better back-pedal too many own goals. Mainstreaming is too successful.
We are therefore left with a figure between the populations shown in Figure 4.1 (to be handed out in lecture). This has projections across the points where we have no data and it has components estimated by taking Scotland as a proportion of the UK.
*Back to the drawing board Scotties.
The figures are for people between the ages of 16 years and 76 years. If we extend this proportionally downwards to include children from birth, the total figure we obtain for the UK is 26,096 former Deaf school pupils and 47,028 Deaf and partially Deaf. We can also see that this population is declining. That is although the percentage of people with a hearing loss remains much the same, there is a reduction in the number of Deaf school students and probably as a result, a reduction in the size of the Deaf Community. It is our expectation that this is not solving the problem of Deafness but that it is *creating a sub-group of Deaf people who do not have the benefits of Deaf Community resources. We would expect this problem to be seen later in life in higher levels of mental ill-health.
*Lack of BSL leads to poor mental health? Where is that proof?
