Deaf ACCESS: Adapting Consent through Community Engagement and State-of-the-art Simulation

The U.S. Deaf community “a minority group of 500,000 people who use American Sign Language“ is one of the most understudied groups in biomedical research. One reason is the frequent use of research techniques that are not accessible to Deaf people. In response to these issues, we will lead Deaf ACCESS: Adapting Consent through Community Engagement and State-of-the-art Simulation. Collaborating with Deaf community members as part of our research team, we will adapt informed consent procedures to make them more Deaf-friendly, and then use medical simulation to train research assistants how to recruit and enroll Deaf research participants. Our long-term goal is to increase the number of Deaf people who participate in biomedical research studies, and encourage more Deaf people to become actively engaged in the research world.