One of the New Zealand Association for the Deaf’s priorities is to get interpreters for the profoundly deaf.
This was the message in a speech from Mrs Pat Dugdale, field officer for the association, read to a luncheon meeting of the Rotary Club of Wellington by her assistant, Ruth Pemberton.
Mrs Dugdale was absent from the meeting after a minor accident.
“Easily silenced, easily ignored” were the words she used to describe the profoundly deaf who make up the association. She said they were generally at a disadvantage in the political and public field.
Mrs Dugdale, herself deaf since the age of 9, outlined in the speech,
Steps Toward a Better Tomorrow for the Deaf, the priorities of the association which have been presented to the Board of Health committee on hearing.
Mrs Dugdale said interpreters would be valuable in places like courts, where there had been a case in Wellington of a deaf woman in the dock unable to understand the proceedings.
Mrs Dugdale said that though she was a fluent speaker she could be difficult to understand and her assistant usually read her speeches. That was cited as another example of the need for interpreters.
The association also wants total funding and extension of field officers for the deaf. It wants a review of education for the deaf, a leadership training scheme and an examination of the need for a special psychiatric service.
Mrs Dugdale said: “We have the futile and harmful absurdity of deaf patients being diagnosed and treated by psychiatrists who cannot communicate with them…”
She said the association still needed to find 25 per cent of its funding, particularly to extend its services to areas like Hawke’s Bay and Otago where it is urgently needed.
Mrs Dugdale listed three groups of deaf people — deaf children, adults who were born deaf or became deaf at an early age, and people who became deaf during adulthood.
She said there was a need to present a “united front” and to this end the Combined New Zealand Societies for the Deaf had recently established a national secretariat.
Three people from the association, two deaf, will go to Washington’s Gallaudet University for the deaf next month to study leadership training.
Mrs Dugdale said the Wellington field office was assured of survival but was “more or less chronically hard up”.
It needed a new office due to the takeover of the DIC building.
