Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to help reduce health inequalities experienced by deaf people.

It is for individual National Health Service organisations, including NHS trusts and integrated care boards, to comply with the Equality Act 2010. Under the Equality Act 2010, organisations have a legal duty to make changes in their approach or provision to ensure that services are as accessible to disabled people, including deaf people, as they are for everybody else. This includes responsibility for ensuring that there is adequate provision of British Sign Language (BSL) interpreters to support deaf patients.

Health and social care organisations must make reasonable adjustments to ensure that disabled people are not disadvantaged. The Reasonable Adjustment Digital Flag was developed in the National Repository, a digital system within the NHS where key patient information is stored to enable health and care workers to record, share and view details of reasonable adjustments, across the NHS and social care, wherever the person is seen or treated.

Following the launch of the Reasonable Adjustment Digital Flag Information Standard, published in September 2023, the flag went live in the National Care Record Service and is being rolled out across England.

Since 2016, all NHS organisations and publicly funded social care providers are expected to meet the Accessible Information Standard (AIS), which details the approach to supporting the information and communication support needs of people with a disability, impairment or sensory loss.

NHS England published a revised AIS on 30 June 2025. NHS England is working to support implementation of the AIS with awareness raising, communication and engagement, and a review of the current e-learning modules on the AIS. The intention is to ensure that staff and organisations in the NHS are aware of the AIS and the importance of meeting the information and communication needs of disabled people using services.