For decades, conversations about whether a truck driver is fit to be behind the wheel have understandably focused heavily on fatigue. However, while managing fatigue remains an essential safety responsibility, being within your permitted work and rest hours doesn’t always mean you’re fit to drive.
Illness, injury, medication, physical health and mental wellbeing can all affect a person’s ability to safely operate a heavy vehicle. So can the pressures that come with working in an industry where deadlines are tight and the freight still needs to be delivered.
The Heavy Vehicle National Law (HVNL) reforms expand the existing driver duty beyond impairment by fatigue, to include being otherwise ‘unfit to drive’. A driver is considered unfit where they are not of sufficiently good health or fitness to safely drive the vehicle. Importantly, the duty applies to drivers of all heavy vehicles over 4.5 tonnes, rather than only drivers of fatigue-regulated heavy vehicles.
The principle behind the change is relatively simple. Instead of only asking: “Is my driver fatigued?”, the question becomes: “Is it safe for my driver to drive this truck today?”
There are plenty of reasons why the answer might be “no”. A driver could be dealing with an illness or injury, a chronic health condition, psychological or emotional stress, or medication that affects alertness, concentration, coordination or reaction time. There are also pressures that can’t be captured by a work diary. Financial stress, family issues, long periods away from home, delivery deadlines and pressure from customers or others in the supply chain can all contribute to someone continuing to work when they may not be in the right condition to do so safely.
Small operators carry enormous responsibility. You’re often the driver, operator, scheduler, compliance manager and business owner all at once. When you’re juggling all those roles, it can be very easy to put your own health and wellbeing last and simply keep going.
For small operators, particularly owner-drivers, meeting your obligations isn’t something that needs to become another complicated compliance exercise. A practical starting point can be as simple as having a documented pre-start fitness check and genuinely asking yourself whether you’re fit to safely drive before getting behind the wheel that day.
Just as important as asking the question is having a plan for what happens if the answer is no. For businesses with employees, this means having processes that allow drivers to speak up when they’re not fit to drive without feeling they’ll be penalised or pressured to continue working. A fitness declaration isn’t much use if the culture around it tells a driver that saying “I’m not fit today” isn’t an acceptable answer.
Fitness can also change during a journey. This is particularly important for long-distance drivers who may spend days or weeks away from home. Being fit when you start a job doesn’t guarantee you’ll remain fit throughout it.
For operators, the changes are also a timely reason to look at existing fitness-for-duty arrangements and consider whether they adequately address risks beyond fatigue.
What is appropriate will depend on your business. A small operator doesn’t need the same systems as a national fleet, but every operator should have a practical way of if a driver is fit to safely undertake the task.
October is National Safe Work Month, and it’s a good opportunity for all of us to think about safety beyond simply ticking the compliance boxes. The new unfit to drive duty reinforces something that should already be fundamental to our industry. No delivery, deadline or commercial pressure is more important than getting yourself, and everyone else sharing the road, home safely.
