Deaf Rhetoric : An Ecology of Health Communication

This book guides healthcare professionals, hospital administrators, and medical interpreters in the United States (and internationally) in ways to better communicate with Deaf and Hard of Hearing (D/HH) patients and sign language interpreters in healthcare settings.

The book addresses an understudied aspect of access and is written by an international deaf researcher from Japan who uses American Sign Language (ASL) and English as non-native languages. In order to identify appropriate interpreting services for specific treatments, the author focuses on healthcare professionals'' and D/HH patients'' interpreting preferences for critical and non-critical care in the US, and offers a new theoretical framework, an Ecology of Health Communication, to contextualize and analyze these preferences. The ecological matrix and its five analytical dimensions (i.e., physical-material, psychological, social, spatial, and temporal) allow readers to understand how these dimensions influence healthcare professionals'' and D/HH patients'' interpreting preferences as well as the treatment outcomes. This book concludes by prioritizing the use of an appropriate interpreter for specific treatments and allocating funds for in-person interpreters for critical care treatments.