Sleep apnoea and road accidents - our memorandum of evidence to the Transport Select Committee

[This post is tagged "nothing to do with e-learning...]

Earlier this year the Transport Select Committee began an Inquiry on Road Safety. The then Chair of the Committee, Gwyneth Dunwoody MP, who sadly died in April of this year, helpfully agreed to allow my family to submit a memorandum of evidence, well beyond the closing date, concerning the problem of undiagnosed sleep apnoea and the large numbers of vocational drivers suffering from it. 

Our evidence is now available on the Parliament UK web site. One of the things we called for was for the  Health and Safety Executive, with its responsibilities for minimising work-related death and injury, and with its powers to insist on action by employers to prevent risks to non-employees (that is, road users at risk from drivers suffering from sleep apnoea), to play a much more prominent role in relation to work-related fatal road-traffic accidents and their prevention. The Transport Select Committee's  report, published on 15/10/2008, makes scant reference to sleep-related road accidents, and none to sleep apnoea, but it is nevertheless good to see that the report highlights, in paragraph 110 the anomaly that "the vast majority of work-related deaths are not examined by the Health and Safety Executive, purely because they occur on the roads", and calls for the Government to "review the role of the Health and Safety Executive with regard to road safety to ensure that it fulfils its unique role in the strategy beyond 2010".