Indeed, it seems unlikely that the pessimistic view of the state of company hearing conservation programs derived from the NOES study could be true. Maybe this data may have been flawed. Is there some other way that we could assess the status of hearing conservation? What if we were to try to establish the size of the market for hearing conservation? Then, we could compare the size of the calculated market to see if the economics of the hearing conservation service and product suppliers match the projections.

A simple way to do this would be to take the $63 per worker per year and multiply it by the approximately 30 million workers in the U.S. who are at risk. This method projects the market for hearing conservation/hearing loss prevention to be about $1.8 billion per year.

Since this convention is one of the premier venues for companies in this line of work to contact prospective customers I would assume that these service providers would be up on the exhibit floor in great numbers. A $1.8 billion dollar per year market is a BIG market.

Now, I’ll tell you my knee-jerk reaction/assessment. When I look at the exhibitors in the exhibit hall I don’t see $1.8 billion worth of noise control and hearing loss prevention services being offered to you. Actually, it looks much more like a market analysis done several years ago for another convention which implied there is about $320 million worth of market in this country. Maybe the missing $1.5 billion dollars are being spent internally by companies internally producing these services and products. But, also maybe there is big segment of the market that has decided that they don’t have to provide these services and products to their workers. We really don’t know.