Responding is Renée Lefrançois, audiologist, director of audiology, SHOEBOX Ltd., Ottawa, Ontario.

To optimize employee safety and well-being, employers need to provide hearing conservation training and protection, as well as comply with OSHA’s standard on occupational noise exposure (1910.95). By introducing an in-house hearing testing program, employers can meet testing requirements without significantly impacting productivity.

Let’s dive into in-house testing as compared with outsourced models and how it can create a more optimal experience for both workers and hearing conservation program managers.

Offsite testing

Some employers opt to send employees offsite to a local occupational health clinic for annual hearing testing. Costs associated with this model include the clinic’s testing fee and transportation for the employee to travel to and from the clinic.

Another hidden expense is lost productivity. Because hearing tests are an employment responsibility, employers are required to pay employees for the time required to complete the hearing test. On occasion, this could also mean overtime pay. If the organization in question runs several work shifts per day, it may be necessary to pay a second employee to cover the time that an employee is away for hearing testing, resulting in additional labor costs with no increase in production.

Aside from the financial challenges that offsite testing imposes, most clinics still default to paper audiograms that make comparisons to baselines and historical tests challenging. Further, paper records aren’t easily uploaded into occupational health software platforms, which adds manual data entry efforts onto the hearing conservation managers. To meet OSHA requirements, all audiograms must be securely filed and preserved for the duration of that individual’s employment.

Outsourcing a small team of employees for annual hearing testing at a clinic can be an effective strategy in certain instances. However, cost and compliance concerns often lead to the consideration of alternative options.

An onsite mobile clinic

Mobile clinics can provide a convenient annual testing option, as they travel onsite, which reduces the need for employee travel. Typically, a mobile clinic is a truck equipped with multiple sound booths and can test employees simultaneously, speeding up the testing process as compared with outsourcing to clinics.

However, a fair amount of time and organization is involved in this type of batch testing. Health and safety managers must coordinate the scheduling of annual tests and retests for all new and current employees under their hearing conservation program. Not all mobile clinics are able to provide after-hours testing for 24-hour facilities. Those that do may include surcharges for evening and overnight testing schedules. For facilities with hundreds or even thousands of employees to test, scheduling alone can take several weeks for program managers. This is both costly and heavy on resource time that could be better spent on other programs and initiatives.

In-house testing

If you’re managing a hearing testing program for more than 100 employees, a practical and cost-effective choice is to implement in-house testing. The benefits of in-house hearing testing extend beyond cost-effectiveness and include a more optimal employee test experience, reduced scheduling challenges and improved compliance rates.

The scalability of an in-house program allows employers to establish a testing regimen on a rolling schedule, rather than forcing a once-per-year model that can be disruptive to regular operations. Armed with easy-to-use, mobile audiometric tools, employers can seamlessly conduct baseline tests as part of the onboarding process and schedule annual tests aligned with start-date anniversaries, birthdays or other convenient times. By embracing cloud-based data management and reporting tools, the need for traditional paper records is eliminated, ensuring the secure storage of all relevant data on the cloud.

Boothless hearing testing technology allows employers to conduct hearing tests in any sufficiently quiet, comfortable and private location that meets the OSHA requirements for maximum permissible ambient noise levels, creating a more welcoming employee experience and one that facilitates more employee involvement.

Editor's note: This article represents the independent views of the author and should not be considered a National Safety Council endorsement.