Abstract
BackgroundAn estimated one in five drivers will be over 65 by 2030. Compared with their younger counterparts, older adults are more likely to experience health and functional impairments, including cognitive dysfunction, which may interfere with their ability to drive safely. Law enforcement officers, as part of the public safety community, need help in developing the necessary skills to identify and manage these medically affected drivers.MethodsTo address this need, in partnership with the California Highway Patrol (CHP), Training, Research and Education for Driving Safety (TREDS) at the University of California, San Diego, developed a certified two-hour training curriculum. To complement the training, the TREDS team also developed a roadside screening tool to assess for disorientation related to person, place, and time. The tool was developed, validated with a sample of persons with dementia compared to cognitively normal controls, and deployed in the training. A total of 2,018 police officers received instruction at 103 training sessions.ResultsAt baseline, prior to training, only 26 % of officers had reported drivers to the Department of Motor Vehicles in the previous 6 months. After training, 96 % stated they were likely to use their standard reporting forms, and 90 % reported they were likely to use the roadside screening tool.ConclusionsThe certified training and tool were well received and resulted in changes to knowledge, attitudes, and intention to incorporate their new knowledge and tools into roadside screening.
Highlights
An estimated one in five drivers will be over 65 by 2030
Driver Orientation Screen for Cognitive Impairment (DOSCI) validation study To validate the DOSCI, independent samples t-tests were used to assess the significance of differences in mean scores between individuals with dementia from the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and cognitively normal controls
Independent unpaired ttests indicated that the mean number of errors was 2.36 (SD 2.14) incorrect answers for patients with dementia, compared with only 0.22 (SD .51) (p < .0001) incorrect answers for control patients (Df = 66)
Summary
An estimated one in five drivers will be over 65 by 2030 Compared with their younger counterparts, older adults are more likely to experience health and functional impairments, including cognitive dysfunction, which may interfere with their ability to drive safely. Unless the physician has been trained to recognize the symptoms and systematically screen for them, the condition may escape notice (Chodosh et al 2004). Reinforcing this tendency, they remain less prone to self-regulate their driving than their healthy counterparts (Wong et al 2012), though certain types of feedback may help promote self-regulation in impaired participants (Ackerman et al 2014). Physicians can be reluctant to broach the topic of medical
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