Abstract
Occupational noise is unavoidably produced from dental equipment, building facilities, and human voices in the dental environment. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of occupational noise exposure on the dental professionals’ health condition. The psychoacoustics approach noise exposure assessment followed by the health risk assessment was carried on at the paediatric dentistry clinic and the dental laboratory in the Prince Philip Dental Hospital of Hong Kong. The A-weighted equivalent sound level, total loudness, and sharpness values were statistically significantly higher for the noise at the laboratory than that at the clinic. The degree of perceived influences and sharpness of noise were found to have the impacts on the dental professionals’ working performance and health. Moreover, the risk of having a bad hearing state would a have 26% and 31% higher chance for a unit increment of the short-term and long-term impact scores, respectively. The dental professionals with the service length more than 10 years and the daily working hours of more than eight showed the highest risk to their hearing state. The worse the hearing state was, the worse the health state was found for the dental professionals. Also, the risk of dissatisfaction would be increased by 4.41 and 1.22 times for those who worked at the laboratory and a unit increment of the long-term impact score. The constructed health risk mode with the scientific and statistical evidence is hence important for the future noise management of environmental improvement.
Highlights
Occupational noise is defined as any unwanted sound being produced in working environments [1]
The international standard of the eight-hour daily occupational exposure to noise is no more than 85 dB(A) A-weighted equivalent sound level (LAeq ) for a five-day workweek in any working environment [2]. If it was over this limit, the occupational noise exposure would be a potential hazard to our hearing ability in causing noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) [3]
Since dental professionals would move from place to place during their daily work, the general acoustic environment of the clinic and laboratory in the study was represented by averaging the objective data in the noise exposure assessments at the different locations instead of a single assessment at a certain location with a long elapsed time
Summary
Occupational noise is defined as any unwanted sound being produced in working environments [1]. The international standard of the eight-hour daily occupational exposure to noise is no more than 85 dB(A) A-weighted equivalent sound level (LAeq ) for a five-day workweek in any working environment [2]. If it was over this limit, the occupational noise exposure would be a potential hazard to our hearing ability in causing noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) [3]. Even though occupational noise exposure was within the limit, a poor sound quality of noise would bring the negative impacts of working performance [4], physiological [5], and psychological conditions, and a self-reported state of health [6] on the people in the environment.
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