Employers have to provide a safe workplace and look after their employees’ health, safety and welfare whilst they are at work. That includes not subjecting employees to noise levels sufficiently high or prolonged to damage their hearing. There is even a specific regulation covering noise at work; The Control of Noise at Work Regulations 2005. Nobody should be running a company that undertakes noisy work who isn’t also well aware of their legal duties under health and safety law.
If it can be demonstrated that your employer failed to take steps to protect you from the harmful effects of a noisy working environment or work processes and that your hearing loss was a reasonably foreseeable consequence at that failure then you might be able to make a claim for work injury compensation. Often, people considering making a claim for compensation will rely on the specialist expertise of a personal injury solicitor to determine for them whether the circumstances that gave rise to their noise induced hearing loss was work-related and was due to the negligence or carelessness of their employer.
For instance an employer might have failed to make a change to machinery that ran more quietly or to change processes to avoid the generation of so much noise. They might have failed to time limit employees’ exposure to the harmful noise levels or might not have installed acoustic shielding to separate workers from the sources of noise. They might even, all other ways of reducing noise having proved impracticable or less than 100% successful, have failed to issue their employees with personal protective equipment in the form of ear defenders.
At the most fundamental level and most unforgivably they might not have made their workers aware of the dangers of exposure to workplace noise. Within such a culture the acceptance of unprotected exposure to high noise levels are taken as much for granted as the weekly pay cheque and the unfortunate result is the thousands of cases of work-related hearing loss being identified every year, year after year. It’s a workplace health issue that seemingly refuses to melt away. Perhaps we should shout a little louder about it.
Want To Claim Compensation For Noise Induced Hearing Loss ? Don’t delay – call today
Losing your hearing will have an enormous effect on your life and if you were not to blame for losing your hearing, it is only fair that you are compensated.
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