During the past couple of decades, Monica Elaine Campbell could often be found quietly walking the halls of The Ottawa Hospital (TOH). Small in stature, with a twinkle in her eyes, she is a true force for good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Profoundly deaf since birth, Monica Elaine has been a leading advocate for improving health care for the Deaf community for over 25 years. Her work with our Deaf Patient and Family Advisory Council (PFAC) has positively impacted a great many individual lives, including patients, families and health-care workers at TOH and across the Ottawa region. Monica Elaine spent her early life at a school for the deaf in Prince Edward Island learning to speak and speechread, which is the act of interpreting a person\u2019s spoken language by observing the speaker\u2019s lip movements, facial expressions, gestures and body language. In fact, Monica Elaine didn\u2019t even encounter sign language until well into her thirties. With great difficulty, she earned a university degree at the University of PEI and began working in government, relying only on speechreading, textual reading and constant extra study.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her early oral learning had been enormously difficult and physically exhausting, but after decades of practice, Monica Elaine\u2019s ability to understand speech and to speak aloud has become exceptionally fine-tuned. And yet, her hearing loss is so profound that she has never heard a word in her life, even with a powerful hearing aid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a young adult, Monica Elaine remained isolated from other deaf people. It was only later, when she moved to Ottawa and began to learn ASL at the Ottawa Deaf Centre, that she began to gain a new sense of self \u2014 a new identity as a member of the Deaf community. It was here that she learned that the culturally Deaf (as opposed to deaf, which is a physical condition) see themselves as a distinct socio-linguistic and cultural group whose main language is American Sign Language (ASL) or Langue des signes quebecoise (Quebec Sign Language). They seek each other out for social interaction and emotional support. Deafness is natural to them; it is a positive identity \u2014 NOT a disability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As she learned more, Monica Elaine no longer felt like a \u201cbroken person needing to be fixed,\u201d teetering between the hearing world and Deaf world. Instead, she started identifying herself as a person who happens to have been born deaf and who has various communication needs and skills depending on the circumstances she is in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Monica Elaine never expected or planned to work in health care. A single fateful encounter in the late 1990s was all it took to open a whole new world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOne day,\u201d she recalls, \u201ca nurse from The Ottawa Hospital contacted me and asked if I would consider communicating with a patient who was very ill.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The patient, whose voice box had been removed, was no longer able to communicate with her family by pen and paper due to extreme weakness. She was desperate to continue communicating with them as she approached her final hours. Monica Elaine said yes \u2014 she would try to help.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI had never done communication facilitation before,\u201d explains Monica Elaine. \u201cI put my hand on the patient\u2019s right arm and hand and said,<\/ins> \u2018I want to be sure I\u2019m not making mistakes, so what I will offer is: whatever words you mouth, whatever I can understand, I will verbalize. And if I understand correctly, then your family can respond.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The patient was very weak. Her lips barely moved. To understand her words,<\/ins> Monica Elaine had to lean in quite close. Yet still she was able to repeat aloud most of what the woman wanted to say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI was there for five hours,\u201d recalls Monica Elaine, \u201cand I came away a different person. It really made me think,<\/ins> \u2018What if it was me as a patient? What if it was any other Deaf\/deaf patient? How would communication work?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n This experience led Monica Elaine to begin making inquiries among her Deaf\/deaf friends in Ottawa about death among the Deaf\/deaf, and she discovered that many of them had very sad tales to share. Without the ability to communicate in hospital or hospice, both the quality of care and the patient experience were often horribly compromised for Deaf\/deaf patients.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In response, Monica Elaine led nine Deaf colleagues in registering for Palliative Care courses at Algonquin College. Despite initial resistance, she convinced the Dean to accept Deaf people\u2019s registrations and approve the provision of ASL interpreting services for all classes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This was just the first step in a very long journey, which included countless other obstacles. Yet in the years that followed, Monica Elaine and her colleagues made enormous strides in advancing care for the Deaf. Among many other achievements, Monica Elaine and her valued colleague, Christine Wilson,<\/ins> founded and co-led the Ottawa Deaf Health Care Team in 2009, which led directly to the creation of Canada\u2019s first Deaf PFAC at The Ottawa Hospital in 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Monica Elaine was invested into the Order of Ontario in 2016 for her selfless work to provide palliative care for the Deaf and advocating for the rights of Deaf people to access interpretative services in health-care settings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Monica Elaine Campbell has left the Deaf PFAC in strong hands, having built a strong foundation of care for the Deaf at TOH. As she steps away, however, it is only right that we celebrate how many lives she has helped to make better, and how much her singular persistence and vision have helped TOH to become a better hospital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thank you, Monica Elaine!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Monica Elaine Campbell never planned to work in health care, but what started with one patient turned into over two decades of impact. She has helped transform health care for the Deaf community, improving access, communication and dignity for Deaf patients across Ottawa.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":283276,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[483,412],"class_list":["post-283275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-healthy-tomorrows","tag-patients-as-partners","tag-population-health"],"acf":[],"wps_subtitle":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ottawahospital.on.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ottawahospital.on.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ottawahospital.on.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ottawahospital.on.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ottawahospital.on.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283275"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.ottawahospital.on.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":283285,"href":"https:\/\/www.ottawahospital.on.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283275\/revisions\/283285"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ottawahospital.on.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/283276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ottawahospital.on.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ottawahospital.on.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ottawahospital.on.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Recently, we had a chance to sit down with Monica Elaine, who stepped back from her role leading the Deaf PFAC a few years ago to take full–<\/ins>time care of her husband, who was rapidly declining with Parkinson\u2019s and Lewy Body Dementia. She told us about her journey and the impressive legacy of care she leaves behind.<\/p>\n\n\n\nSpeaking and speechreading\u2026the early years<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Every health-care journey begins with the first patient<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
A resolute commitment to improving care<\/h3>\n\n\n\n