Risk perception, knowledge and safety attitude and hearing protector use in petrochemical industry workers

Hearing protectors (HP) are widely employed as the only measure against noise exposure. However, it is well known that unless do workers wear HP continuously, its efficacy will be very low. The purpose of this study was to determine the influence of risk perception, knowledge and safety attitude on hearing protection use in petrochemical industry's workers. In this cross-sectional study a structural questionnaire was administrated to 236 randomly selected workers in Iranian petrochemical industry who had been to 85 dBA noise and some influencing factors including risk perception, knowledge and general attitude to safety on using of HP had been investigated. This study showed that only 20.3% of employees claimed to wear hearing protection all the time when they exposed to noise. There was a significant relationship between use of hearing protector and worker's risk perception (p=0.048) and also their knowledge about hearing protection (p=0.009). Also, the relationship between general attitude of workers to safety and risk perception was statistically significant (p=0.046). The results of the study showed that for promoting the use of hearing protectors, two main strategy should be followed. First, removing the barriers to make hearing protectors compliant, and second enhancing the worker's risk perception about hearing loss and proper use of ear protectors.