Almost 11 million people in the UK have hearing difficulties or is deaf - and having feedback from our local deaf community has helped us select a new British Sign Language provider from 1 June.

From this date we will be working with a specialist provider of British Sign Language (BSL) called Topp Language Solutions. This is in addition to Pearl Linguistics who we continue to use for written and spoken languages such as Urdu, Polish, Arabic etc.

Associate Director of Engagement & Inclusion Ruth Mason, pictured with Cassandra Topp, Managing Director at Topp Language Solutions (TLS) told CHFT Weekly: "I was pleased we had more than 40 deaf people attend an event to talk to us about their experiences. Their feedback really helped us work out the selection criteria we needed for our new service.

"I'm delighted we're going to be working with TLS. Cassandra has personal experience of the deaf community having deaf parents, so is in a fantastic position to offer an empathetic service to CHFT.

"We have worked closely together to create a specially designed portal into our own CHFT booking site which is safe, easy to use and tailored to our needs".

Please use TLS for new bookings. You can pre-register to use their service now – please see the intranet for information, including a guide to booking (which is also attached at  the top of this page). We'll also add two new icons to the non-clinical tools section of the intranet before 1 June. A poster (see attached) will also be circulated to wards before 1 June for display in staff areas.

Information about any Big Word bookings

Our contract with The Big Word ends at midnight on Tuesday 31 May 2016, though they will honour any appointments already made - even beyond this date. Please use TLS for new bookings only.

The full file path to find information about this is Divisions > Corporate > Interpreting services