Health and Wellness Programs for Commercial Drivers (2007)

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49 Several suggestions for additional research flow from the work done on this synthesis. These are summarized as follows: • Research should continue to provide the best possible information to those charged with updating the Physical, Medical, and Fitness Standards for Commercial Driving Qualifications, so as to be able to address not only transient states, diseases, and medical conditions, but also the specific functional abilities research has linked to crash causation. • More applied worksite health and wellness research should be done, particularly to elucidate how it pertains to employee health and safety in the surface transportation industries (commercial truck and bus/motorcoach drivers). • Academic and research institutions that examine work- place health and wellness issues must communicate more clearly the current findings about what works in health, safety, and productivity management and report how suc- cessful programs involving commercial drivers can be inte- grated to meet corporate organizational goals (see Goetzel 2005). • Researchers should conduct additional examinations of successful commercial driver health and wellness pro- grams, that is, conduct more in-depth onsite surveys and structured interviews during visits to truck carriers and bus/motorcoach companies that have demonstrated suc- cess in driver health and wellness programs. For example, studies should (a) explore what types of data are necessary to convince senior managers to invest in improved driver health, safety, and productivity programs and (b) determine how employers can involve health plan providers as partners in health, safety, and productivity management efforts. If possible the research should deter- mine what the ROI is for such efforts. • More research should be done to identify where commer- cial driver health, wellness, and fitness programs fall in the safety continuum, focusing specifically on the impact of such programs on improving highway safety. • A commercial Driver Health and Wellness Program Tem- plate should be developed that contains all the elements of a well-designed program, but that can be easily adapted to each company’s circumstances and driver operations. The program should also include training and communication templates and provide a myriad of ideas for successful implementation. • Transportation employers and policy makers are experi- encing “informational gaps” regarding the value of health, safety, and productivity management programs. Much of the solid and usable information already produced by employee health and wellness advocates should be “pack- aged” and be made readily available for public use in the commercial driving community. Such information would have to be screened, selected, and produced with a con- sensus “seal of approval” of what is generally acceptable, and then be disseminated industrywide. Public relations and media experts might assist in crafting the communi- cation of such information so that it is presented in a straightforward and credible fashion. • The program materials in both the Gettin’ in Gear wellness program and those used in the Mastering Driver Alertness and Fatigue course should be updated and upgraded periodically. The current printed materials dis- tributed in the fatigue and alertness course are mostly dated before 1996 and do not include the findings of the last decade of FMCSA-sponsored research on commercial driver fatigue. The materials distributed in the Gettin’ in Gear wellness course are from 1999 to 2002. Infusing more current research results and practical applications into both programs would be exceedingly helpful to the commercial driving community. The communication media used in both programs could be upgraded to meet current Internet web-based and computer electronics advances. • The conduct of train-the-trainer program classes on Driver Wellness and on Driver Alertness and Fatigue should be C H A P T E R 7 Suggestions for Future Research

renewed. Carriers and trucking associations want and request such training. Additional implementation should provide more course offerings countrywide. A renewed effort should be made to involve and include bus and motorcoach companies in such training. • Researchers need to reach out more to the bus/motorcoach community, to enlist participation and cooperation in examining the benefits of driver health and wellness programs. • Research on truck and bus driver health and wellness should be linked more closely to and participate in a coop- erative way with programs sponsored by OSHA and NIOSH. This coordination effort would ensure that the best features of other occupational and workplace health and wellness programs are applied to commercial driving issues, that they meet statutory safety program requirements, and that they enhance the links to health and safety initiatives in the commercial driver workplace—the nation’s highways. 50