The importance of hearing health: employees with hearing loss continue to miss out in the workplace

In the UK, hearing loss affects 1 in 6 working age adults (7 million people), costing the UK economy ￡25bn in lost productivity and unemployment every year.?A huge, emerging global health challenge, hearing loss has already overtaken diabetes as the third biggest cause of disability-affected life years across Europe and the US.?

More surprisingly, hearing loss is significantly correlated with several co-morbidities of which most people are unaware.?These include compromised speech perception leading to increased social isolation and loneliness; depression; falls; cardiovascular disease; cognitive impairment and dementia. In fact, the Lancet Commission on Dementia in 2017 pulled together several key papers to conclude that even mild hearing loss can double your risk of dementia.

The impact of unaddressed hearing loss in working age people is particularly relevant in the workplace.?Difficulty hearing quickly becomes an acute source of work-related stress, and presents a significant mental health challenge in both personal and professional life.? Employees report feeling isolated as they struggle to engage in the community around them, and anxious and stressed about a reduced ability to perform well in the workplace.?

Current estimates indicate that, on average, employees with hearing loss earn ￡2,000 less per annum than their co-workers, and ultimately retire nine years earlier. CPOs and HR directors will fully appreciate the personal and organisational impacts of these losses.?

Proactive and preventative hearing health measures are critical. We almost all factor regular eye tests and dental check ups into our healthcare routines, yet hearing often remains neglected with an overwhelming 79% of Britons never having had a hearing test.

This is why ex-NHS Chief Executive Amanda Philpott and ex-DJ / digital products specialist Andy Shanks (who both have hearing loss) have founded eargym (www.eargym.world), and are seeking to establish partnerships with employers to test out what works best.?

eargym is a new, affordable, digital hearing fitness platform that makes it easy for people to factor hearing healthcare into daily life. eargym provides enjoyable, immersive hearing training that stimulates the parts of the brain responsible for hearing. Hearing is more than just our ears, it’s how we make sense of the sounds we hear.?Where you might consider hearing aids helping the hardware of hearing - the mechanism for taking sounds in - eargym is effectively a software upgrade for the auditory system: immersive training stimulates the brain to adapt and improve its ability to process sound and challenging audio environments.

eargym’s training is designed to improve the five key hearing skills of detection, localisation, discrimination, and intelligibility in silence and in noise. These are crucial to hearing in day-to-day life and help us get the most out of every experience. In user-testing, 71% of testers improve their hearing test results by an average of 14% in just four weeks.

In addition to co-morbidities associated with hearing loss, noise exposure is a serious safety hazard; although cases of noise-induced hearing loss are completely preventable, they remain the second most common reason for employers’ liability insurance claims for occupational health.

The good news is that there is lots of simple advice we can give to staff to help reduce the risk of damaging hearing. To find out more about the actions we can take, you can review our resources document.

eargym is seeking to bring much better hearing health to the workplace. We are already undertaking a number of pilots with businesses with health and well-being schemes for their staff, and the outcome of this work is informing not only eargym’s product development but also the individual businesses’ approach to hearing health at work.?

We are keen to build partnerships and pilot with willing organisations in the NHS and / or public sector.? If you’re curious, please do email [email protected], to find out more.

Resources:

• Most people don’t know how their hearing actually is. Our hearing age test is a handy tool for anyone who wants to get an indication of their hearing level in less than sixty seconds.?
• Calculate the financial impact better hearing at work could have at your workplace.
• Proactive and preventative hearing health measures.
• eargym’s Resources: discover how our hearing works, and the measures you can take to look after it.
• Find out more about the eargym app in our product video.

Thank you to HPMA (Healthcare People Management Association) for sharing our article in their October newsletter. You can read their full newsletter here: https://www.hpma.org.uk/newsletters/