TRAINING & EDUCATION
FIRST THINGS FIRST
Founder of Driver First Assist, David Higginbottom, underlines how training commercial drivers to deal with traffic collisions could speed up road recovery and, more importantly, save lives.
Each year, there are around 138,000 reported road traffic collisions (RTCs) on UK roads, and assuming even one commercial driver is stopped at each of these accidents for just 45 minutes, the impact on businesses across the country is a combined total of 12 years of lost time.
It goes without saying that the real cost of accidents is far greater than simply a financial one though. Every day, five people leave home but never make it back. That’s the average number of people who die in road traffic collisions, day in, day out. Driver First Assist’s (DFA) vision is for hundreds – if not thousands – of trained drivers to be equipped to take action in the first critical moments after an RTC. The road network is the UK’s largest workplace and, in the same way they would in the office, employers must take part in ensuring it is a safe place for everyone.
Many road safety initiatives rightly focus on preventing accidents, but the reality is that with a quicker response time many of those lives lost as a result of unavoidable collisions could have been saved. A person can die from a blocked airway within four minutes, but the ambulance target response time is twice that. Currently, anywhere between 39% and 85% of deaths are caused by airway obstruction, and 55%
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of fatalities occur before the arrival of the emergency services. The life- saving benefits of immediate first aid are obvious.
The DFA initiative works by training professional or fleet drivers – the drivers most likely to be first-on- scene at a road traffic collision (RTC) – to deal with the aftermath, from securing the scene to administering basic first aid and providing vital guidance to the emergency services when they arrive. This scheme aims to save lives and minimise the severity of injuries, reducing the burden on the NHS, and helping re-open roads more quickly. Estimates suggest that through this early response, fatalities caused by road traffic collisions could be reduced by a dramatic 46%.
We are all familiar with first aid in the workplace, from whose responsibility it is, to the number of first aiders needed on site. However, for the sake of efficiencies in meeting these quotas, employers are more likely to train office-based employees in first aid, than those who are frequently off-site, such as truck, bus and coach drivers and sales people. That is, employees that spend a large part of their working lives on the road.
As a result, companies are inadvertently populating the road network with workers, more than
35
3 million of them, with little or no first aid skills. And, unlike their workplace based counterparts, these individuals are almost entirely dependent on the emergency services for a medical response.
Corporate social responsibility aside, there are many tangible corporate benefits of the training. The DFA course has Driver Certificate of Professional Competence accreditation, granting commercial drivers of trucks and buses seven of the 35 training hours they must do every five years. In addition, having skilled individuals able to provide support early on at the scene of an incident inevitably leads to a quicker clear-up and means everyone can get on their way faster.
People killed while driving for work make RTCs the UK’s number one occupational killer. Stringent regulations imposed by the Health & Safety Executive mean that office-based health and safety is better than ever, but with no similar guidance mandatory for employees driving for work, it is up to businesses to be proactive in improving on-road safety for all.
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