Occupational Hearing Testing Options: Clinics, Mobile Clinics, and Boothless Audiometry

Occupational hearing conservation programs typically test employees one of three ways: sending them to a local clinic, bringing in a mobile testing clinic, or running boothless audiometry directly on-site. Each comes with its own trade-offs in cost, disruption and record-keeping.

Sending staff to a local clinic can be expensive, not to mention disruptive for both the employee and the employer. Costs include paying the clinic's testing fee, and clinic hours will dictate when employees can be tested. This can mean paid time away from work while employees visit the clinic. Depending on the type of business you run, it may also mean the cost of a second employee to cover that shift and any other transportation or parking expenses you cover for your employees. While costs add up, productivity is being impacted.

Sending staff to a local clinic can also pose a potential challenge for record-keeping. The typical output of a clinic visit is a paper copy of the audiogram. For compliance maintenance, that audiogram must be filed with the employee's records and kept for 30+ years. It can be a challenge for health and safety managers to ensure these audiograms are filed in the days or weeks after the clinic visit. Alternatively, the manager can manually enter the results into an audiometric monitoring software platform, but that also takes time.

If yours is a small team of people who need to have an annual hearing test, sending them to a clinic can be a good approach. Nevertheless, as the team grows, the cost and compliance challenges may nudge you towards considering a different approach — such as a mobile clinic or boothless, PC-based audiometry conducted directly at your facility.