Awareness and Usage of Sign Language among Doctors in Main Khartoum Hospitals (Ibrahim Malik, Bahri, Omdurman) October 2017

Background: When a deaf person become ill a big problems are emerge beginning with explanation of their medical issues, understanding of their medical problems, medications, management and their whole condition. So there is an undeniable need for improving the communication between physicians and deaf patients, non-verbal language is a form of communication that needs to be understood and validated in health services and physicians must be trained to deal with them. Method: Descriptive and cross-sectional study. The duration of the study is one month, with target population 1290 doctor. Objective: To Evaluate awareness and uses of sign language among doctors. Results: 112 house officer, 96 registrar, 85 medical officer and 12 consultants returned completed questionnaires. More than half of doctors (52.1%) consulted with deaf patients in their medical practice. Also the most frequent method of communication used were using of relatives and others people for interpreting and communication (22.6%), followed by writing (12.8%), only (11.5%) used sign language and the least used method was the lip reading (4.9%). 95.7% were aware of sign language importance and 68.5% of them were agree with addition of sign language into medical curricula. Conclusion: This study highlights the deficit in using of sign language among doctors that make the medical consultation with deaf patients less effective. Doctors must be qualified and experienced in dealing with patient having special needs.