Developing evidence based hearing standards for the Police Service

Police officers are required to carry out complex listening tasks as part of their job every day, such as listening to important commands whilst driving with a siren sounding. It is therefore important that employees possess sufficient hearing ability in order to carry out their job safely and effectively. Currently, police officers' hearing is assessed primarily using pure tone audiometry (PTA), a measure of sound detection. It is known that there is a weak correlation between PTA and performance on complex listening tasks, like listening to speech in noisy environments. This is particularly relevant in a setting where an employee's ability to understand speech is critical for their ability to carry out their duties. There is currently a gap in our ability to assess hearing in a way that can be used to accurately select and monitor police officers (and indeed other services working in noisy environments) in terms of their functional hearing ability. This is important in order to predict whether police officers can carry out their job safely and effectively and avoiding unfair discrimination against those who may have raised hearing thresholds but have sufficient functional hearing to continue their duties. In addition such a task-based assessment can help with identifying any early signs of hearing loss developing and allow preventive measures to be taken.
This PhD project will involve: (1) identifying the hearing critical tasks carried out by the police officers within the Police Service, (2) the design, development and validation of a functional hearing test that assesses whether police officers possess sufficient hearing capabilities in order to carry out these hearing critical tasks to the required standard.
The current proposal is linked to previous in our group, where in response to a request from the Ministry of Defence for improved measures of auditory fitness for duty for military personnel, the University of Southampton Hear for Duty team have identified the mission-critical hearing tasks carried out by infantry and combat-support personnel and explored using speech-in-noises as an alternative method for assessing performance on these tasks. An iPad tablet application has been designed and developed which runs the British English version of the Coordinate Response Measure (CRM) SiN test. This is currently being explored as a new method for predicting performance when carrying out mission-critical hearing tasks with the ultimate goal of using this tablet app to assess auditory fitness for duty.
The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) is keen to develop and implement an improved method for assessing the hearing capability of their police officers, with a particular emphasis on firearms officers. The University of Southampton has established links with the Clinical Lead and Service Delivery Manager for Occupational Health and Wellbeing within the MPS and well as the Lead MPS Audiologist and the occupational health company responsible for the health assessment of police officers.