Below is a transcript of the speech:

It is good to see so many faces in the audience of people who I have met over the last year.

I feel honoured to be asked to speak today, at my first UKCOD meeting.  I have only been at RNID for a year, while many of you have worked for this cause for many years.  But RNID has a proud and long history as an organisation. We have campaigned for political change, delivered pioneering services and invested in medical and technological research. Yet I am also aware that the role of RNID has at times been controversial.

It is not a surprise that the biggest organisation in a sector often attracts the most attention and the most criticism, which in our case has sometimes been deserved.

But with size and influence comes responsibility.

I know that in the past we have not always exercised that responsibility well. At times we have appeared as a predator when we should have been an ally; a competitor when we should have been a collaborator. I want to change this.

I am more of a fan of partnership than partisanship. I know that real progress is made through partnerships and that, like marriage, you have to work hard to make partnerships succeed – but when you do succeed you can achieve much more together than you can individually.

Even before the current financial turmoil real pressure had grown for us all to look critically at what we are doing and how we are doing it. The current environment is challenging but great challenges create great opportunities - if we find better ways of working together and moving beyond the issues that have at times divided us in the past.

What are the big trends we need to respond to?

Deaf people still cannot take for granted that their communication and care needs will be addressed and their rights to communication support are often ignored.  Sign Health has done so much to publicise the inadequacy of provision for deaf people with mental health needs.

Young people in transition from a school environment to adult life, who are deaf or are affected by hearing loss, are less likely to be able to get good access to health care, training opportunities, employment or a full social life than their hearing friends.

I cannot forget the proud father who described how his deaf son had got onto an apprenticeship course but then told me that 80% of his school friends are on benefits, with little prospects of jobs. We know that unemployment for deaf adults is four times the national average. The credit crunch and a recession will make it even harder for this group to find work and Government programmes are failing these people.

A growing elderly population. Today 11 million people are over pension age, and by 2027 the number of people over 65 will have increased by 60%. Increasing numbers of people will live with hearing loss in the future.

We also know that at present it takes people 10-15 years to act on hearing loss and that the longer hearing loss is left and the worse it becomes, the harder it is to take simple steps to address the loss. Early adopters of hearing aids gain more benefit and satisfaction than those who leave it for years.

But already demand for hearing aids surpasses capacity to supply. 700,000 hearing aids a year are dispensed free of charge by NHS in England.

Hearing aid waiting times are a major problem throughout the UK, and demand will increase with an ageing population, the NHS of the future will have hard choices to make about which conditions are dealt with free at the point of demand and which we will be expected to contribute to directly, or to purchase from the private sector.

Developments in science and technology hold out great hopes for new interventions and better technology to help with the consequences of hearing loss and the potential to challenge the inevitability of age related hearing loss. But this activity is seriously underfunded by the state and the private sector.

We face a dual challenge:

We need to address both parts of the problem. We need to change the public’s attitude towards hearing and RNID believes that by doing so we will also change their understanding of and empathy with those who are deaf.

Perhaps it is because people value their eye sight, their mobility, their health, of course their children and even their animals, that these causes have historically been more successful than we have in securing resources to fight their corner and make the world a fairer place. We need to change this.

We need a public and private sector that can rise to the challenge of providing a flexible and responsive service tailored to meet individuals’ needs and provided in a way that helps remove the stigma associated with hearing loss. Why should it be any more difficult to get a hearing test than an eye test, hearing aids than glasses?  Why should NHS audiology be in the hospital rather than the GP surgery or the High St?

RNID’s new strategy

When I came to RNID I looked at the original reasons the charity was set up – back in 1911 our founders stated the purpose was to "promote and encourage the prevention and mitigation of deafness and the better treatment, education, training, employment and welfare of people who are deaf or hard of hearing". 

The language seems strangely modern for something written in 1911, and in many ways the advance of technology and modern communications makes the purpose far more achievable now than it was then.

We have reviewed and reworded our vision to describe the kind of world RNID is now working to create and that is:

"A world where deafness or hearing loss do not limit or determine opportunity, and where people value their hearing."

In working for that vision, our activities will centre around three themes:

Over time this will require a major shift for us as an organisation. While in some of these activities RNID has historically been strong, we have to develop in others.

We have to reach out to the 50 million or so people who do not have hearing loss as well as to the 9 million that do.

What does this mean?

Starting with rights and opportunities. We will continue to provide services and support to the deaf community.  I was puzzled when I came to RNID to see the criticism expressed by some people that RNID was not really interested in the deaf!

As I started to learn more I found that over £20 million of the £46 million we spend each year goes directly on services benefiting profoundly deaf people. Many of those services are subsided by voluntary income, we do not make a surplus on them.

But of course the concern was never really about the money but more about the place and recognition that deaf culture is given within RNID.

I think the problem of expectations needs to be addressed head on. Of course there must be a strong and effective lobby for deaf culture. But RNID is not the organisation best placed to be that campaigning voice - the British Deaf Association is, the majority of their members are from that community, the majority of ours are not.

We see deafness as a disability and we work within the context of human rights and the framework of the Disability Discrimination Act. We will fight for deaf people to have those rights and to ensure that they have the best services available, but we are not the organisation to promote Deaf culture. This should not mean we have to be in conflict with the deaf community.

Our role should be to help ensure that those different voices survive and prosper. The new chief executive of the BDA – Simon - and I have already met and I am optimistic that our organisations can not just co-exist but co-operate with each other in future.

RNID will continue to provide support for people to live independently in the community, we will develop our innovative mental health projects, support people in their employment needs and with communications services, but we won’t claim to speak on behalf of the culturally deaf community.

The largest group of people with hearing loss are older people whose hearing has declined with age and they too get pretty poor services, both in terms of the length of time they have to wait for hearing aids and aftercare beyond the Audiology clinic. Too many sophisticated digital hearing aids lie unused in drawers, and we need many more volunteer led services like Camtad and RNID’s hear to help projects. We also need to keep lobbying for lip-reading classes to be seen not as a hobby, a ‘nice to have’ but as an essential element in rehabilitation for some-one who has acquired hearing loss.

At the other end of the age spectrum we need to look at more tailored services for young deaf people, to facilitate their transition to adulthood; increasing support and opportunity from education to training or employment. For RNID this extra focus will grow out of our already established expertise in employment, mental health, social care and technology.

But we need more than a service response - we want to look at a different way of engaging with and supporting young  people through consultation and involvement,  in order to create support and services specifically for them and led by them.  Clearly this is not something RNID can or should do alone, we will work with the NDCS in particular who have so much expertise in working with deaf children and their families,  and I know that RAD are also interested in this work.

But how do we get from rights and opportunities to Promoting Hearing Health?

You may know the story of Brian and Mike who were sitting by a river. A person is swept past obviously drowning. Brian jumps into the river and saves the drowning person. Duly grateful the saved person goes on her way. As Brian sits down another person floats past and being a good Samaritan Brian jumps in and saves the person; and this sequence is then repeated -  again and again. After a while it dawns on Mike that it might be wise to go and find out who is throwing people into the river, rather than keep on fishing them out.

We are in very much the same position - if there are ways of saving people from losing their hearing rather than trying to deal with the consequences, then we should do this. While this was clear to RNID’s founders, we have as an organisation, to some extent lost sight of this and we are now determined to redress the balance.

We will do this in two ways:

Scientific developments have already made a profound impact on our understanding of how to prevent or protect against the effects of age related hearing loss. Within the next twenty years we could realise the ambition to protect millions of people against age related hearing loss.

We have already seen what sustained support for new technologies can achieve - Cochlear Implants have revolutionised the lives of thousands.

The prospect of developing oto-protectants against noise induced hearing loss holds out the chance of protecting generations of young people, the military and those in industries with exposure to loud noise from its effects. Imagine a world where we no longer have to mount campaigns to ensure that people protect their hearing - because a pill will do it for them.
What we can only imagine today, could become reality in the future.

Yet this can only happen if there is sustained a consistent funding from Government.  Research into the causes of hearing loss is woefully underfunded in this country and we are going to campaign for a significant increase to Government funding.

At the same time we are going to grow RNID’s medical research portfolio to deliver a better understanding of hearing biology, increase our influence within the research community, and seek the development of new drugs and therapeutic interventions for age related hearing loss.

But we cannot wait for the promise of scientific progress for the future at the expense of those in need now. This is why we will work with the whole population to get them to value their hearing.

Hearing is probably the most undervalued of our senses

In the same way that we don’t think about the oxygen we need to stay alive or the gravity which keeps our feet on the ground, most of the population takes its hearing for granted.

Why don’t people value their hearing or take early action when they notice they are not hearing as well as they used to?

Stigma is part of the reason

We will mount a major public awareness campaign to persuade people to value their hearing more by appreciating the role it plays in their lives and the connection it enables them to have to other people.  We will extend our very successful Don’t Lose the Music Campaign to all age groups to get people to value and protect their hearing.

We will also launch a major new campaign for a national hearing screening programme for people over 55, backed by our own campaign of enhanced testing, building on the 350,000 people who have already taken our telephone hearing check.

But there is little point stimulating demand if we don’t also campaign for more accessible services based in the local community and in the high street at sites that are easier to get to, moving provision away from the acute medical model of care.

We will continue to work with the Department of Health to drive down waiting times and to improve service quality and patient support after fitting.

We have to be honest and acknowledge that it is increasingly unlikely that if people really take their hearing health more seriously that the NHS can shoulder all of the extra demand on the system - even less likely in these financially straightened times.  We have to be willing to think about new models of delivery and co-operation.

The private sector could play a bigger role-but only if it can show it can be trusted by, often vulnerable customers. The voluntary sector can help here. We can ensure that the sector is an effective voice in monitoring and improving delivery - whoever provides the service. In short we need to be the consumers’ champion and RNID is looking at developing an accreditation system to give consumers confidence and choice in providers.

These are just some of the key points in RNID’s new strategy which I wanted to share with you.

But to return to my broader theme.

I have been hugely influenced by a recent Book called “Forces for Good” on what makes a high impact not for profit organisation. The authors outlined 6 key principles in their book, which RNID has taken on board as our operating principles – in other words the way we work.

I am determined that RNID will be a force for good which will create lasting impact on individuals and society.

We will do this by:

Crucially amongst our 6 principles are:

To nurture networks and to inspire evangelists. It is only, if we can put aside, jealousies, historic lack of trust and differences in approach and instead bring together our combined power and talents that we can really change the world of hearing loss and deafness.

When I look at the visual impairment sector and see the enormous progress they are making by coming together through vision 2020 this makes me wonder could we do the same? 

The changing and growing needs of the communities we serve,  the change in population and the prospect of major scientific advances mean that we need to think differently about how we can work together to achieve common goals.

We are in a time of scarcity after the years of economic growth.

We are in a time of fast paced technological and social change.

We are in a time where people want real control over the services they receive.

We cannot have looked at the American elections without realising that the way the political world is organised is also changing fast, with things happening more and more from the ground up.

Martin Luther King did not begin his famous speech by saying “I have a strategy”. But Barack Obama needed a strategy, an organisation, networks and inspired individuals in local communities to turn that dream into a reality.

As organisations in this room who have much more in common than we have that divides us , I think we should use our position and resources to create a network of individuals and organisations – voluntary, public and private sector – to build a movement to change the world and its attitude to hearing and the impact of hearing loss. 

It is time for us to change the way we do business in the voluntary sector and this will mean working ever closer together.

Times of challenge are times for new thinking and within the UKCOD family I hope we will do that thinking together.

Thank you.