House Martins have offered small scale, specialist residential care for deaf adults with learning disabilities since 1991. We are proud of our growing reputation for quality and of our excellent inspection record. The management team are all experienced qualified Social Workers dedicated to the provision of high quality care.

The service consists of two well maintained family size dwelling houses in suburban Salford, Greater Manchester. The two houses are about a mile apart and blend in to the community. A great deal of thought has gone into ensuring that internally as well as externally, the properties remain true to the ‘ordinary house in the community’ principle as regulations allow. Also a matter of principle, we do not believe in using newsletters, pictures of residents going about their daily business to publicise the service – even if they were happy to give consent. We are totally committed to promoting the right of residents to dignity and privacy.

successful and a placement made, reviews are conducted in partnership with the placing Authority on a six monthly basis or as and when needed. We operate a keyworker system and develop our own person centred service delivery care plans in partnership with the placing Care Manager and service user.

All of our support team can communicate in British Sign Language to a minimum level of Stage 1 CACDP.

BSL is sometimes referred to as being Britain’s third language. Like Welsh, it is a language with a different grammatical structure from English. This means that signs are not presented in the same order as English. It is a visual language and is the natural first language for most pre-lingually deaf people in the UK.

Other languages sometimes used by deaf people in the UK:

Makaton

Makaton started as a research project to find a method of communication for deaf adults with learning difficulties in a hospital in England in the early 1970s. It is a popular language and communication programme for people with learning difficulties of all sorts in the United Kingdom. For the reasons given above, for most deaf people with learning disabilities, we feel that BSL is more flexible, appropriate and socially inclusive.

Putting together a package of care for a deaf service user with learning disabilities can be quite a challenge. Because commissioning a specialist high quality service is expensive and difficult for such a small user group, many local authorities have to look nationally for a specialist resource. This is why our residents have been placed with us from right across the UK. It is important to make the right placement at the earliest opportunity in order to minimise the risk of care package breakdown and unnecessary additional moves.

Individuals are referred to us for a service for a variety of reasons, including transition from children’s services and placement breakdown. We have a good track record in working with people who in addition to their learning disability and deafness have additional needs including autism, epilepsy and some minor mental health problems. We have also found that some behaviours which challenged more mainstream services often diminish once individuals have their communication needs met in a BSL signing environment.