Konekt provide commercial drivers medicals to assess your workers’ fitness to drive.
Driving a heavy vehicle or driving for commercial activity, is particularly demanding, with more time spent on the road, the demands of the vehicle size and the responsibilities for passenger safety, just to name a few.
The impact of heavy vehicle crashes on other road users and the environment can also be considerable.
So good health and fitness to drive is not only essential for road safety, but a higher standard of health is required to safely operate a commercial or heavy vehicle, including public passenger vehicles.
The licensing requirements as well as the broader heavy vehicle legislation and accreditation programs reflect these health requirements. All these programs aim to support you in staying healthy and safe to drive.
Driver health and fitness to drive is an important factor in supporting the safety of everyone who uses our roads.
The national driver medical standards Assessing Fitness to Drive (AFTD) set out the considerations and medical criteria for safe driving.
They also guide our management of drivers with health conditions so they can keep driving for as long as it’s safe.
We use these standards to assess and manage any health conditions that may affect your ability to drive safely.
These assessments may also be part of employer work health and safety programs or industry accreditation schemes.
There is a range of medical conditions, disabilities and treatments that can adversely affect driving ability, possibly resulting in a crash causing death or injury.
Assessing Fitness to Drive’s primary purpose is to increase road safety in Australia by assisting us to:
Using these standards ensures the fitness to drive of each patient is assessed in a consistent manner.
Some of the conditions that can commonly affect driving include:
Assessing fitness to drive standards for commercial vehicle drivers allow for differences in risk of different drivers.
For example, a farmer requiring a commercial vehicle licence for the occasional use of a heavy vehicle on their own property is very different to that of an interstate multiple combination vehicle driver.
This is something we bear in mind when examining a client and when providing advice to the driver licensing authority.