Información sobre salud bucal de sordos Merideños

Abstract

The Deaf Community, a group of persons whose natural language is the sign language, has its own culture and distinctive ways for communication which imply particular informative needs. As a linguistic minority into the hearing-people community, deaf people present difficulty to access to information specially related to health which in turns results is inequity when offering and receiving such a service. Thus, as an attempt to contribute with the Deaf Community, the present research aimed to describe the information about oral health managed by a group of deaf persons from Merida State. The present was a descriptive, transversal research, based on the qualitative paradigm. Twenty deaf persons with different levels of formal education conveniently selected among the Merida’s Deaf-people Association participated in the study. A semistructured interview about oral health was video recorded for each participant. Later, the interviews were transcribed and analyzed to generate categories. It was found that the Deaf Community manages insufficient information about oral health, mainly in relation to oral diseases. It is concluded that deaf population requires more information which should be provided in their native language to guarantee better oral health conditions. Therefore, the development of educational programs for Deaf-people and formative ones for the health services hearing-people working with such population are proposed.