Hearing is believing!

Noise induced hearing loss experienced in the workplace, especially during the much of the twentieth century, was too often simply ignored or viewed as “part of the job” in many engineering or manufacturing industries.

Within the factories and workshops across the industrial heartland of the north of England and the Midlands, there was little or no ear protection offered or awareness raised of the long term hearing damage that can be caused by working in close proximity of noisy machinery.

The most common reasons for not necessarily linking excessive noise levels in the workplace with hearing loss are not recognising that your ability to hear is slowly deteriorating, assuming a physical blockage, such as the build up of earwax or living with high blood pressure or diabetes. Also, it is often mistakenly assumed that the ageing process naturally leads to a decline in hearing ability.

A recent WeSolicitors client, Peter Sinderby, only realised that he may be suffering significant hearing loss as a result of having worked for ten years during the 1960s and 70s in a highly noisy papermill factory when friends and family repeatedly told him he was speaking too loudly!

It was only after responding to a WeSolicitors advertisement to take a hearing test that Mr Sinderby discovered both the extent of his hearing impairment and an excessively noisy workplace as being the real cause.

However, pursuing a claim for compensation from the employer’s insurers partly involved, would not be without a challenge, which WeSolicitors, ultimately, overcame to win damages for Mr Sinderby.  Click here to read the full story of Peter Sinderby …