Hearing Damage Threat To Call Centre Staff

16th November 2006

Glasgow, the UK's call centre capital, to host conference

Increasing numbers of injuries and illness, and subsequent damages claims, caused by acoustic shock and other noise related hazards are to be discussed by leading experts at the second Acoustic Safety Conference at the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre in Glasgow on November 27 and 28.

Delia Henry, the director of the Royal National Institute for the Deaf in Scotland, will tell the conference about the dangers to call centre staff in Scotland, and the resulting threat to call centres and the Scottish economy.

Glasgow is the UK's call centre capital with more than 200 centres within the Strathclyde region, employing over 20,000 people, with new ones being opened all the time: O2 has recently opened a new centre employing over 1,500 staff. In Scotland as a whole, there are over 300 call centres employing over 60,000 people, with a total of 900,000 staff employed in the sector across the UK.

Lisa Fowlie, president of the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health, Europe's largest professional health and safety body, will make her first presidential keynote speech to the conference since becoming president earlier this month.

Incidents of acoustic shock - a sudden and unexpected noise received through headphones or earpiece - are on the increase, and medical specialists, such as specialist ENT surgeon Mr. Don McFerran, Dr Janice Milhinch from Australia and Drs Baguley and McKenna from the UK, will be providing evidence and advice on how to recognise and manage risks to hearing from sudden noise inside call centres.

More than 700 people have suffered acoustic shock and have been compensated with a total of around £2.5 million to date. Around 300 further known cases are pending. There are believed to be many more people who have experienced acoustic shock but do not realise it.

With such a high incident rate, it would be expected that the call centre industry was taking steps to mitigate the risk to its employees. Although some organisations are, the vast majority are not. A recent report has revealed that almost two thirds of the 900,000 people in the UK employed in the call centre industry are not protected by a health and safety policy to cover acoustic shock (ContactBabel 2005).

The Acoustic Safety Conference will be attended by professionals and managers working in call centre environments, and by health and safety advisers to call centre operators. It will examine the potential impact on personal health of noise interference and the loss of hearing.

The first conference was held in November 2005 at the National Physical Laboratory near London. Since then, the new Control of Noise at Work Regulations 2005 came into force this April which only helps to confuse the growing issues surrounding noise interference and acoustic shock occurring at volume levels lower than those identified by this new legislation.

Full details of the conference timetable, and of the speakers, can be found on the conference website at www.acousticsafety.org