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Fitness-To-Drive Decisions Can Be Difficult Driving a vehicle is a complex task that requires intact perception, good judgement, adequate response time and reasonable physical capacity. Unfortunately, many medical conditions and some treatments can result in impairment of these functions & therefore the ability to drive safely. However, diagnosis alone is rarely enough to determine whether a person is safe to drive. In Australia, guidelines for Assessing Fitness to Drive have been developed to assist medical professionals in making recommendations about driving ability. These guidelines state that if the treating health professional "is concerned about a patient's ability to drive safely, the patient should be urged to seek the assistance of a driver assessment service." This is necessary because it is often difficult for a health professional to make accurate judgements about a persons driving capacity in the clinical setting without specialised assessment tools. A DriveABLE assessment provides the most fair & accurate way of objectively determining whether someone is fit to drive. Our assessments were developed through award winning research specifically for testing experienced drivers with medical conditions that affect mental abilities. Performance is compared to age matched healthy, competent drivers & only those drivers who have declined to a level that is outside the normal range are recommended to cease driving. Errors that have been shown through research to be related to competence are scored, while those that are just bad habit errors do not influence the results. This protects those drivers who remain competent from being unfairly penalised. |
