Case Study
Workplace design for a physiotherapist

The company is a health center with a physiotherapy practice that has hired a new employee with a severe disability.

The man is severely hard of hearing and almost deaf. Due to his disability, audible information must therefore be acoustically amplified or modified so that it can be perceived visually or tactilely by the man. He is able to communicate verbally using spoken language. The lips of the person he is talking to should be clearly visible so that he is able to understand spoken language using hearing aids (hearing aids) in conjunction with lip-reading. The man is also able to communicate using sign language.

The man is a trained physiotherapist and was unemployed before being hired by the company. He attended a seminar run by the Integration and Inclusion Office in order to be better prepared for situations with hearing customers or people requiring treatment.

The physiotherapist is responsible for the care and treatment of people who are ill. When people enter the practice, in addition to an acoustic signal for the hearing employees, a signal is also sent to the physiotherapist's vibration detector, which is attached to his belt. The signal is generated by a motion detector on the door and transmitted wirelessly to the vibration detector. For phone calls, the physiotherapist uses the Bluetooth interface on his hearing aids. The existing telephone system had to be replaced by a telephone system with Bluetooth support. For direct conversations with the people being treated and colleagues, the physiotherapist is dependent on supporting eye contact in order to be able to lip-read due to the minimal residual hearing. He therefore has to point this out more often to people who do not yet know him.

The hearing aids were subsidized with a fixed amount by the statutory health insurance. The additional costs for the hearing aids with additional features such as Bluetooth were borne by the man himself. The workplace design was funded by the employment agency as part of the new employment. The employment agency and the rehabilitation team also called in a specialist integration service to help with job placement and job design and funded an integration grant as a wage subsidy for the company. Advice on hearing aids and adaptations was provided by a specialist hearing aid acoustics store.