CIICA LIVE: CI ADVOCACY: WHAT DO WE NEED?

THURSDAY 22ND JANUARY – 18:00 UK; 19:00 CET; 13:00 EST; 10:00 PST; 05:00 AEDT; 07:00 NZ

Rob Beenders, Belgian Minister and CI user:

Access to CI shouldn’t depend on your age or how well you navigate the system. Get CI advocacy on the agenda – politicians aren’t waiting for you.

Following the success of our Advocacy conference this CIICA LIVE explored further what we need for successful advocacy with Sara Rubinelli, (Professor of Health Sciences at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland), Brian Lamb (Policy Advisor at CIICA), Lidia Best (President at EFHOH, UK), Mark Laureyns (Medical Scientific Research Manager for Amplifon, Belgium), Melis Yildrim Durmaz (CI user, Türkiye) and Vahishtai Daboo (INTEGRATED, India).

Whether you were in Brussels or not – this was a fascinating session, for parents, families, CI users including young people, professionals and industry.

So much information and the ways that different countries are making their way forward with advocacy and progress with CI

This event continued our advocacy programme by looking at one of the major challenges affecting advocates for CI. There is a misplaced perception that CIs are a costly if effective intervention. This is not helped when the sector repeats this framing when it talks about CIs. This session examined how we can create a powerful narrative that illustrates how investing in CI improves lives and is cost effective investment for society. We looked at successful examples of advocates combining evidence on the potential benefits for society in improving deaf people’s lives and how to combine passion with evidence.

Carolina Der, WHO , began by emphasising that Awareness is the start of everything if we want action.

Professor Sara Rubinelli challenged us all to think about the particular challenges of Advocating for hearing loss and deafness: how do we increase Awareness and turn it to influence and action? How do we frame clear messages? How do we frame hearing loss not as a cost but as a high-return social investment? To do this we must use language relevant for those we talk to.

As Mark Laureyns said: the best way to lose is to confuse.

Brian Lamb continued this message – reframing our descriptions of hearing loss not as a cost to society but as an investment, and illustrate how CIICA’s new resource “Investing in Hearing loss Improves Lives and is Cost Effective.” Go to www.ciicanet.org/resources to download. You can also download there CIICA’s Ten Top Tips for Advocacy to help you think about focussing your advocacy work.