How one charity’s response to COVID-19 is allowing them to reach more people than ever

Who are they?

Auditory Verbal UK is a large charity that supports deaf children and their families with an early intervention parent centred coaching programme.

What do they do?

The charity works with deaf children to give them the opportunity to listen and speak as equals alongside their hearing peers. As well as offering practical speech therapy directly to children with hearing impairments, Auditory Verbal UK also works to increase awareness and share expertise with health and education professionals so that many more families can access auditory verbal therapy.

This support is delivered by highly-specialised therapists who teach the child to listen and speak. Eight of 10 children who spend at least two years on the programme graduate with age-appropriate speech and language and most of these go on to attend mainstream schools.

How have they been affected by COVID-19?

Like many charities that work directly with service users, Auditory Verbal UK faced the challenge of having to quickly move all their service delivery online. They were also dealing with the issue of helping to support families whose lives and routines had suddenly and dramatically changed.

It was paramount to keep service delivery running as smoothly as possible so that the vital auditory verbal therapy they provide would not be interrupted – potentially having severe effects on the progress made by the deaf children they work with.

The administrative work needed to oversee this change was intimidating at first. Luckily, the team at Auditory Verbal UK were already using digital conference call platforms internally, due to the fact that their team works out of two offices. This provides more evidence that teams already working digitally are in a better position when it comes to scaling-up operations at short notice.

We have always used online meetings internally as we are at two sites and delivered therapy sessions online but these needed to be ramped up and also "sold" to parents who may have been concerned about their effectiveness initially. Digital has been central.

 

- Jane Warriner, Auditory Verbal UK