Hearing conservation: Regulatory status and issues

Abstract

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration published the final decisions on its hearing conservation amendment on 8 March 1983. Certain changes are likely to cause confusion when OSHA personnel enforce the standard. Employers now must use personal monitoring in cirumstances where area monitoring is “generally inappropriate” unless they can show that “area sampling produces equivalent results.” Also, OSHA has changed the term “significant threshold shift” to “standard threshold shift,” which some individuals interpret to mean an ordinary or expected shift in hearing level. Most changes from the January 1981 version are towards a performance rather than a specification approach, which may result in less rigorous hearing conservation practices, increasing the likelihood that employees will suffer noise‐induced hearing loss before intervention can occur. Consequently, three critical issues have emerged. First, employers and consultants need a standard, practical method of testing hearing protector attenuation as it occurs in the field. Second, OSHA needs to derate the Noise Reduction Rating to reflect real world use, and third, employers need an objective method by which to evaluate the effectiveness of their hearing conservation programs.