You’re an incredibly important voice in a big organisation. You’re not only standing up for your child, but those in a similar situation.
I honestly feel pretty bad about the whole situation, but sadly it is the classic way this organisation often works. Ban now worry later.
Keep making noise. You’re completely valid in doing so!
Yes thanks, will do. I’m also in contact with the deaf community , national deaf children’s society… I want to support having something safe in place, as parent of a deaf teen and qualified health & safety advisor I’m in a knowledge place to be able to do this. I don’t want to throw the RAF cadets under a very public bus but I also won’t accept exclusion and discrimination.
Thank you!
Perhaps I’ve woken up on a particularly grumpy side of the bed, but if it takes this:
To fix this:
Then I’m not against a bit of bus-throwing…
We all want the best for all of our cadets, but sadly it often takes more than just us nagging higher up the chain, so a parents’ voice is so, so important!
Having made a slightly unhelpful comment above about flying, I feel I should also add something constructive to this thread.
I’ve been on the other side of this as a safety supervisor and coach for a cadet with Hearing Assistive Technology (I think a cochlear implant, IIRC, but it may have been another variety of implanted aid) a couple of years back. The cadet relied a lot on lip-reading, IIRC, alongside the assistive technology he had.
As a range team, we’d discussed the cadet specifically before allowing them to shoot (L144, indoor 25m range, FWIW) to decide on reasonable adjustments. One of these was 1:1 supervision (me).
We spoke with the cadet and found that his tech would filter out loud noises - they were confident that noises from shooting would have triggered this, so there would be no damage to either the tech or them.
By policy, though, the cadet must wear issued, serviceable hearing protection, so we’d agreed as a range team that they would do so. IIRC, the RCO or SPO (I forget which) also consulted the TSA who agreed on this approach, but I may be wrong.
The cadet could hear very little while wearing ear defenders. I needed to relay all of the RCOs instructions. It would have been safer IMHO to have not used them, as the cadet would have been able to hear better with little to no risk of NIHL. Providing coaching was also a challenge.
However, we adapt and overcome.
Instead of positioning myself in the “correct” position on the right-hand side and “one position above” the firer, I moved to the left and adopted the same position so that they could somewhat see my mouth without fully breaking their position. I was also confident that I could relay a STOP command efficiently in the case of an emergency. (If I wasn’t, I would have stopped the practice myself so we could re-evaluate.)
In 7 years as a safety supervisor/RCO, I have seen far more dangerous situations due to errors of drill, poor “corrected” vision (usually followed by a polite suggestion to revisit an optician), and poor marksmanship skills.
While there was definitely more risk in this case than usual, the risk was managed, and we found reasonable adjustments to allow the cadet to participate. If I were to do it again, I’d probably suggest reducing the number of active lanes, but otherwise I’d be happy to supervise cadets with similar disabilities again indoors. I’m not sure I’d be comfortable on a 12-lane outdoor range battling against wind noise, though, so there needs to be a degree of judgment by range staff.
Thanks for this, it’s really useful info, I completely agree with your approach, the trainer working with the deaf individual to make a safe method of communication is all that’s required in so many activities to reduce the risk to an acceptable level.
Having worked examples such as this should help facilitate a further discussion with those who have made this stop decision, so I really appreciate it.
Maybe, after an incident, but where was the fire?
I would suggest that a parent’s voice is much more powerful too!
As powerful as all voices can be, none are needed to stoke my passion to achieve the best outcome for all. The right people are working on this at HQ RAFAC, and I, and others like me (I just don’t like to name publicly, but I stress I am not a one man crusade, here), started doing so before I received a single piece of feedback. Keep making suggestions, etc., as we are looking at all of them, but please also work on the assumption that the right people are trying to do the right thing, and that the right audience has already been reached.
It’s not clear to me if this stop has been issued because of:-
Stop further hearing damage
Because range commands might not be heard
Some other undisclosed reason
Have I missed something?
Your second point was the main point on the announcement. A potential scenario where a user of HAT may not be able to hear a safety command.
That said, looking at the update on the shooting portal, there’s more to it, including the potential for further hearing loss. So this is not simple.
Also in the update is an acknowledgement about the initial comms not being ideal. Glad to see it! 
I’ve not seen the comms as I’m just a parent blindly trying to understand what is going on!
If there is a concern for hearing protection to reduce communication is that not a safety concern for all cadets? The hearing protection is designed to muffle noise isn’t it?
How is safety currently controlled? Hand signals?
If there is a concern for further hearing damage then a baseline medical would be needed as well as on going surveillance for all cadets, as would be the case in a work environment through occ health. Again this is discriminatory against cadets who wear hearing aids, because they are being treated differently to everyone else.
Commands are primarily verbal with a range conducting officer shouting “stop” or “go on”
On an indoor or 25m barrack range things are reasonably simple as everyone is reasonably close, in a static position & a static firing point.
On a gallery range it can be more complex as you can a large number of firing points & some practices involve change of distances (start at 300, 10rnds, run to 200yrds - 10rds- run to 100yrds)
Blank firing exercises are different as that comes down to the safety supervision / section ic.
In my initial post I said I understand the caution when it’s fire & manoeuvre but not so much when it’s static.
When I was serving in the RAF, I was suffering from genetic hearing loss and I was referred to Occupational Health circa 2009/10. One of the things the consultant did was put me as unfit live firing - this was for 2 reasons.
The first was to prevent future hearing loss (he wanted to preserve the hearing I had left). I was also advised to wear ear defenders when mowing the lawn or other loud activities.
The second concern was that as soon as I put on a pair of ear defenders on the range, I couldn’t hear any instructions from the RCO. Prior to this, I used to leave one ear slightly unprotected to hear the commands.
This resulted in me being medically downgraded as unfit live weapons - which would have effectively destroyed my career as I would not be deployable. it would also have prevented me signing on for further service.
My bosses at my unit fought the decision and I was sent to a second occupational Health consultant who was much more pragmatic about the situation. He contacted the FS Regiment at my Station to discuss my situation and the reply back was that if he knew I was on the range with that issue - he would be able to manage me by positioning himself near me and, if necessary, he would kick me (no joke) or intervene manually! As a result, the unfit live weapons was lifted and I was medically upgraded again and able to shoot again.
Specialist ear defenders were available that would have helped extensively, but they were extremely expensive back then and they were unwilling to foot the cost of purchasing me a pair.
So, even 16 years ago, this was a stance by the RAF - however, they eventually ended up being pragmatic and finding a workaround.
All of those sound exactly like… ‘reasonable adjustments’…?
Also sounds like the people on the ground that actually deal with stuff being willing (and able) to deal with stuff that those that aren’t on the ground and don’t deal with stuff don’t want to deal with.
Just like us.
We don’t yet know what happened / where / how in order for this stop notice to be promulgated.
Unless there were exceptional privacy / GDOR issues, I would have expected amplifying / explanatory details to have been included in the stop notice.
Consequently, it’s reasonable to challenge the circumstances, especially as there hasn’t been any scope included to outline the expected number of cadets (& CFAVs) who might be affected. Equally, there was no mention of planned research (consultant audiologist level) on the different types of HAT & possible mitigation (visual / physical inputs / noise-cancelling ear defenders / whatever).
I would also think (but some would consider this subjective) that affected cadets (with inputs from parents / guardians would be the experts in their field - what are their limitations / workarounds / environmental controls, etc? How can we adjust to them (within pragmatic safety requirements) to make things work?
Yes.
Shouting louder. (No joke). Sometimes a loudhailer on big ranges.
Ish. This is managed by the MoD.
Noise induced hearing loss is a hot topic at the moment as there have been a number of ex service personnel suing.
Liked? Yes. Expected? No. We’re really not good at the “why?” part of communication, particularly with stop notices like this.
Especially as we are all volunteers & tend to have very enquiring minds, & don’t like being told “no” without a solid / logical reason.