Opinion: Why and How to Improve Driver Health
This Opinion piece appears in the May 19 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.
By Betty Van Huizen-Couture
Vice President
Clinical Services
HEALTHeSIGNALS
I recently gave a presentation on why trucking companies should improve driver health, and how to do it. A simple statistic set the audience back on its heels and, in a grim way, suggested yet another reason for this country’s persistent shortage of truck drivers — an average life expectancy of only 61 years.
That figure was arrived at by taking the 63-year life expectancy of a typical U.S. male unionized trucker and combining it with the 55.7-year life expectancy of members of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association — gloomy statistics provided by the article “Worksite-Induced Morbidities Among Truck Drivers in the United States,” which appeared in 2010 in the journal of the American Association of Occupational Health Nurses. The article went on to note that, by comparison, the general male population’s life expectancy is 75.1 years.
Fortunately, trucking leaders are in a position to turn this trend around, and I’ll suggest why and how they should.
1. Improved overall health ratings help keep the lid on the cost of employee benefits. According to the new Gallup Well-Being Index, truck and bus drivers have the lowest overall health ratings. Improving their health, however, will help to protect them from diseases associated with a sedentary lifestyle and poor diet. Here are examples and how trucking company management can help:
• Diabetes is 50% higher in this driver population than the national average. Create awareness of diabetes as a particular problem for overweight drivers and work with them to improve medication compliance.
• Eighty-seven percent of drivers suffer from either prehypertension or hypertension, i.e., high blood pressure, compared with the national rate of 58%. Monitor blood-pressure readings and coach drivers as necessary.
• Seventy-five percent are overweight or morbidly obese. That’s a concern, because obstructive sleep apnea is associated with a body mass index of less than 33 in 77% of people. Be proactive about weight monitoring. Obesity also puts drivers on the track for developing diabetes and high blood pressure.
• Only 8% of these drivers exercise regularly, compared with the national rate of 49% who put in 30 minutes at least three times a week. Encourage drivers to exercise using a pedometer or other means of motivating increased exercise.
2. Spare yourself and your organization the costs of accidents and liability. Type the words “truck accident” into a search engine such as Google, and the first thing you’ll see are ads for personal injury lawyers primed to pounce.
3. You can prevent accidents in general, lives lost or lives changed forever. Trucking-industry workers experience the third-highest fatality rate of all occupations in the United States. About two-thirds of fatally injured truck workers are involved in highway crashes.
4. The Department of Transportation recently changed the rules for driver medical exams. The May guidelines for best practices by medical examiners suggest being proactive and addressing hypertension, prediabetes/diabetes, obesity and other health problems before an exam. Commercial vehicle drivers requiring
a medical exam or physical for their medical certification now must go
to examiners trained and approved by
the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.
5. Reduce the cost of replacing drivers sidelined, or worse, by ill health. For each lost driver, you’ll have to pay for training, advertising, recruiting, health insurance, fleet insurance and wear and tear on vehicles because of inexperienced drivers.
6. Improve return on investment. For every dollar spent on driver well-being, expect to save $2 to $4.
7. Improve investment value. Finances aside, concern for your drivers’ health will make you part of an elite group of companies making driver health and safety a priority.
8. You’ll be on the good side of the driver shortage. Health problems also force drivers to quit or retire early, which is a reason for the current 200,000 driver vacancies.
9. You’ll be invited to participate in pilots and research projects. Your image will be improved as you are invited to participate in research opportunities to improve driver health.
10. Avoid the cost of doing nothing. Keeping the status quo of an unhealthy driver workforce might seem tempting, but in the end, ignoring the problem will create yet another generation of unhealthy drivers that will cost you in the long run.
Other means of helping drivers to be healthy include:
• Creating an employee health program, possibly with the help of an in-house or outsourced coach.
• Test for driver fatigue using an overnight pulse oximeter to study oxygen levels and/or a mobile sleep study on-site in the truck. This will help see how things really stand with drivers thought to have sleep-related problems.
• Work with drivers to improve blood oxygen levels by motivating smoking cessation.
• Help drivers resist the temptations offered by the nutritionally empty “food deserts” otherwise known as the interstate highway system. Help them avoid packaged processed foods and all-you-can-eat buffets, and teach them to read food labels.
• Provide individual health kits in the truck or encourage multiuser kiosks in truck stops and terminals where drivers can find healthy, well-labeled food.
HEALTHeSIGNALS, based in Buffalo, N.Y., provides health-improvement programs to truck drivers using remote monitoring technology to track health information.
