Survey Results August 2010

Part 1 – DSN Vision

Download the full report here »

DSN’s Vision contains statements that set out the objectives DSN wants to achieve.

In August 2010 we produced a questionnaire so we could ask people how well they think we live up to them. 

The Results   

Although it is not possible to calculate the exact number of potential responses, it is a reasonable assumption that the amount of questionnaires returned represents a small percentage of that potential number. However, as this is our first effort at consultation on this scale, a low response rate was expected and we feel that the number of responses we received was fairly encouraging for our first attempt.

 
Overall Summary

It is very reassuring to see that the large majority of people who responded believe that DSN does achieve the aims it sets itself and some of the feedback comments were very positive. 

However, we were particularly interested in the number of people whose response was “Not Sure” and we intend to examine possible reasons for this:
 

•  The language we use makes the statements difficult to understand
• More communication support is needed
• People don’t know how well DSN lives up to its aims

It may be that the statements need to be amended so that people are clear about what DSN is trying to achieve, or we may need to provide more information about what we do and how we do it. 

These are some of the positive comments we received from people who completed our survey:

 "I think it provides a really good service, we had family sign language support and lots of help from our Social Worker in other ways e.g. Assessment of needs, applying for Direct Payments etc.  Social Worker has been excellent, can't fault her support and help.  As an organisation DSN seems to be doing as much as it can to change people's perceptions about Deafness and provide good services to D/deaf people”.

“We greatly appreciate the DSN provision of Supported Living and the Day Services provided at the Tannery.  We have an excellent relationship with both and you have every right to be proud of these services”.

“DSN does always 'try' to reach its vision and encourages all staff, service users, trusees and the wider community to work together to reach the vision”.

These are some of the key comments and suggestions we received as part of this survey, together with the response from DSN’s Executive management Team (EMT).

 “Written in Red are the comments / suggestions received”                        

 ·        Written in Blue are the responses by EMT                            

 
“Considering the language barriers faced by the majority of Service Users (and some staff) the statements that make up the DSN Vision contain far too much jargon”.

 ·        We will take this to the Trustees away day and we can't promise it will be jargon free but we will do our best to make it less jargon.

 “There are no D/deaf at management level”.

 ·        There are D/deaf people in Management positions.

Right at the very top there are deaf people.  They are elected by the deaf community to act as Trustees.  Also, at Officer level, 2 out of 3 are deaf so we do have them.  They might not be as visible as we perhaps want to make it, we will have a look at ways of making it more visible.  There are also deaf people in the management levels within Deafness Support Network at Team Leader level.

 
 “There is a mixture of deaf and hearing on board of Trustees but not enough consultation with people at ‘ground level’. 

 ·        We are trying very hard to make sure deaf people are involved at governance level.  We have a deaf Trustee rep from Chester, Halton, Macclesfield, Northwich and Warrington.  It might be the deaf community don’t know about that and when we talk with Trustees we will ask those deaf representatives to go back into the community and make that information more available to people. 
 

 ·        We agree, we don't want only D/deaf people or only hearing people making decisions, we want to keep it balanced.

 “Not many services in the East of the County”

 ·        New Macclesfield building

We are hoping the new building in Macclesfield will be ready around February 2011.
The building will have an official launch and will be opened officially after Easter.