Page 52 - OHS, October 2020

HEARING PROTECTION
Three Steps for Mitigating Hearing Loss in The Workforce
Employers should perform a three-step process in order to best determine how to mitigate potential hazards and implement safety protocol.
BY JEFFREY BIRKNER, PH.D. AND CHRIS AREY
The Center for Disease Control (CDC) estimates 22 million workers are exposed to potentially damaging noise at work each year
1 and the effects go far beyond hearing loss.
Exposure to excessive noise can affect more than just workers’ hearing. It can also create dangerous situations, such as an inability to hear warning signals, a decline in a worker’s ability to communicate with fellow employees and a decrease in one’s ability to concentrate. Excessive noise has even been found to cause stomach problems and high blood pressure.
When you consider the harm excessive noise actually creates in the work environment, you can see that the dangers are far reaching and in some cases could be a matter of life and death. If for instance a worker can’t hear a large utility vehicle backing up, well... you see what could happen next.
In most industries, there are many occupational noise sources that can create excessive noise, such as manufacturing equipment, power generators, use of motor vehicles or heavy equipment, aircraft noise, hammering, jackhammering, sawing, drilling, emergency vehicle sirens and construction sites. All of these noises can easily exceed safe levels and over time cause hearing loss.
That’s the thing with hearing loss, it usually occurs over an extended period of time and may go unnoticed by an employee, since humans usually cannot detect hearing loss while it’s happening. Although hearing loss is sometimes temporary it can be permanent.
Employers, that’s why it’s incredibly important that you limit your workforce’s exposure to harmful noises. Whether that be through hearing protection, engineering controls or administrative controls, employers need to be diligent in their efforts to minimize hearing loss.
In deciding how to minimize hearing loss amongst your workforce, employers should perform a three-step process in order to best determine how to mitigate potential hazards and implement safety protocol. The process will likely result in the use of engineering controls, administrative controls, hearing protection devices or a combination.2
Step 1—Recognize That a
Noise Problem May Exist
The first step is to recognize if there is a problem. The problem can be as simple as not being able to properly communicate with another worker a few feet away. It can also be very complicated. For example, a worksite might have many different machines contributing to the overall excess of noise, there may be acoustic cues associated with determining whether a machine is operating properly.
Step 2—Evaluate the Extent of the Problem
In order to evaluate the extent of the problem, employers need to measure noise in the workplace, plain and simple. This can be done using various sound measuring devices, such as sound level meters, dosimeters, and octave band analyzers. It should be
48 Occupational Health & Safety | OCTOBER 2020
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