Wonder if any one can advise on this. what are the chances of getting AA on grounds of deafness if no other additional disabilities. Client has hearing aids during the day and can cope pretty well but my concern is during the night when she isnt wearing them and, therefore, wouldnt hear smoke alarm or anyone trying to break in, or even the burglar alarm going off.
I looked at RNID site and they seemed to imply that there should be additional disabilities. Does anyone have any experience that they could share?

The answer is to look at the night-time care needs.

Does the person need prolonged (=at least 20 minutes) or repeated (=at least twice) attention at night in connection with bodily functions? The exceptional circumstances you describe would not be frequent enough for this.

Doe the person need someone to to be awake for a prolonged period or at frequent intervals to watch over her to avoid substantial danger to herself or others? Someone else sleeping in the same house does not meet this.

Does the person need vibrating or flashing alarms? Possibly. Butshould an older woman get up and confront a burglar anyway???

We have a wealth of information in this area, not all good i might quickly add, as it is a greater lottery than the lottery itself.

The level of hearing loss does have to be a significant one and evidence will need to prove that should anything happen during the night time period, that it would require another person to raise an alarm, but the flip arguement to this, is that this is not an every night occurence and Tribunal judges will use this.

Generally speaking most applications go to appeal, we generally apply stricter criteria to the acceptance of an AA appeal as opposed to DLA. As you say, without evidence of any other other condition, you may well find yourself struggling a little bit with this one.

Hi

I know it's not going to help with an AA claim (which IMHO is going to be difficult to get anyway) but your client should contact her local fire service about smoke/burglar alarms for those people who have hearing problems.

Our local fire service suppled an extremely loud and vibrating alarm system free of charge for our deaf daughter. Fantastic service. We only have the smoke alarm but a burglar alarm can be integrated as well.

Unfortunately I think supply is limited by funding so your client may have to wait for supply. There may also be qualifying conditions (like being in receipt of a disability benefit?) but I don't remember such a question in my case.

Social services may be able to supply the system as well.

Just a suggestion!

We did a great deal of awareness training with fire resue services all over the country when we were in possession of our lottery funding, unfortunately that has now gone (possibly to East London) but the work undertaken has still led to information on most Fire Service websites. Please see link for Birmingham:

http://www.wmfs.net/digitalAssets/100/100769_FS_SightHearingmobility.pdf

Casework team also kindly posted a link rnid's factsheet on smoke alarm systems for deaf people ... but i'm having a problem getting the link to display and work properly ... as an alternative see http://tiny.cc/fe2fo

thank you very much for all your responses! I thought that it was probably quite difficullt - it's actually my mother in this case who I'm not sure that I could persuade to claim even if she had a good case! I will certainly mention the different alarms to her - thanks again

jane