Prevention and Surveillance Branch

Overview

One of the core objectives of the Hearing Center of Excellence is to prevent hearing loss among Warriors and Service members, and Veterans. As part of this overarching goal, it is vital to have a framework and tools in place to monitor the effectiveness of prevention and treatment measures.

The Prevention and Surveillance Branch, which was established to lead this effort, assumes the following responsibilities:

• Work in concert with hearing conservation leaders
• Provide epidemiological evidence to support and sustain current effective measures
• Advocate effective surveillance standardization throughout the Department of Defense, or DoD
• Provide an education agenda and resources to enhance understanding of tinnitus and hearing loss, empower user participation and compliance, and promote personal accountability by each service member or Veteran for their hearing health, and
• Ensure information gathered from Service members and Veterans with service-related hearing and auditory injuries is available to appropriate DoD and Department of Veterans Affairs personnel in order to optimize prevention strategies

Goals and Objectives

• Launch a worldwide hearing loss prevention public awareness campaign, especially aimed at current, former, and prospective members of the Armed Forces and their families designed to promote the use of hearing protection, and foster an understanding of noise pollution, and off-duty and occupational safety measures 
• Develop requirements to interface Defense Occupational Environmental Health Readiness System Hearing Conservation data with authoritative personnel databases and the electronic medical record
• Gain access to, and incorporate questions into, the pre- and post- deployment readiness assessments and evaluations for information sharing and analysis purposes
• Develop interactive Web-based educational tools
• Determine scope of fitness for duty standards for applicable position requirements and individual qualifications to inform U.S. Army and Marine Corps Military Occupational Specialty codes, U.S. Air Force Specialty Codes, and U.S. Navy and U.S. Coast Guard Ratings, and implement these standards across all services, and
• Publish qualified product standards for hearing protection and communication systems aimed at better hearing conservation and noise control