Children’s Health Ireland is delighted to be celebrating Lámh Day 2021

The theme of this year’s Lámh Day is “Where do you Lámh?”

Lámh is a manual sign system used by children and adults with intellectual disability and communication needs in Ireland. We have children who use Lámh attending our hospitals and outpatient departments. Some of these children may have a specific diagnosis e.g. Down Syndrome, ASD and other children may not be able to communicate through speech following medical interventions e.g. post tracheostomy.

We want to use Lámh Day to raise awareness of Lámh among staff in CHI. We want to show families that their children can Lámh when they come to CHI.

Lámh currently has 586 signs. There were new signs added from sports and technology added in 2019. With Lámh, speech is always used and key words in a sentence are signed. Using Lámh signs can reduce frustration, as the Lámh user is able to use signs to ask for what they want, to answer and to take part in conversation.

Children’s Health Ireland will today launch the ‘Sign of the month’ initiative and Introduction to Lámh staff training. We ask our staff, patients and families to keep an eye out on our digital screens across all our sites for the ‘Sign of the month’, and to learn along with us. We are grateful to the families of Lámh users attending Down Syndrome Wicklow. They have advised us on signs they would most like staff to know.

Please visit www.lamh.org for information about Lámh and Lámh training.

Happy Lámh Day from us all in Children’s Health Ireland.