The celebration of the European Deafblind Conference last 24th of August in Lille, France, was the ideal setting to present the European Indicators for Deafblind Project. With the attendance of 21 members of 7 different countries (France and Slovakia were not present), the second phase of this major task, developed under the guidance of APSOCECAT, was introduced to the public.
The first part of the plan, accomplished during the Copenhagen summit on May 2012, dealt with defining and writing down which should be the correct indicators for the assignment. Once that was achieved, a second one consisted in the development of a complete questionnaire dealing with all relevant aspects in the different categories.
The main objective was to deliver the questionaries among every deafblind Organization Expert´s in the continent and be able to gather as much information as possible.
All the collected data will be very useful to create a European general model of care for the deafblind, the Indicators for Deafblind Equality in Europe (IDbEE). This precess will allow the detection of the best practices on European level, as well as the right proposals on how to designed to right model in our field, which later will be publish in a book.
Two were the main concepts delivered during the assembly: the final details of the review, finding out the correct material to complete it by mid September; and the distribution of work between all those deeply involved on the book assignment. Other subjects were also debated throughout the meeting, such as which will be the suitable material for the advertising campaign of such an important project, and whose moto is: “Make noise about Deafblindness”.