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Listed below are comments made by SebSchmoller between Friday, 12th September 2008 and Saturday, 13th September 2008.

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Sleep apnoea: tiredness kills 5:59pm on 13 Sep 2008 Jack Semple of the Road Haulage Association is either ill-informed or being disingenuous.

Between October 2007 and February 2008 four cases went before the courts in the UK involving nine people being killed by lorry drivers who had fallen asleep at the wheel and who were later found to be suffering from obstructive sleep apnoea. (On 1 August 2005 Alice-Anne Fuge, Nestor Siles and Jessie McCann were killed on the A82 near Alexandria, Scotland. On 21 July 2006 Malcolm, Janice, Richard and George Dowling were killed on the A34, near Bicester. On 8 August 2006 my nephew Toby Tweddell was killed while waiting in a traffic queue at the M62 Rocket Interchange, Merseyside. On 14 April 2007 Leonard Nicholls was killed on the A48, Eastern Avenue, Cardiff.)

Furthermore there is substantial published scientific evidence, of which the Government is aware, that a sleep apnoea sufferer is more likely to suffer a road accident than a non-sufferer. (A sleep apnoea sufferers' performance is likely to be impaired as badly or even more seriously than that of someone who is over the legal limit with alcohol.)

The absence of any reference to sleep apnoea on the RHA web site is surely a sign that the road haulage industry has not got its act together on the problem of sleep apnoea amongst truck drivers, and that pressure now needs to be put on the industry to get the problem controlled.

Seb Schmoller
Sleep apnoea: tiredness kills 12:55pm on 12 Sep 2008 Looking trucks "as a whole unit" is important, as justfloating proposes in his or her first post above:

"Trucks should all have black boxes that are randomly inspected. Just a GPS, breaking load monitor, and rumble strip detectors would soon capture the ones that have problems. Very simple to build and no sensing connections necessary to the vehicle."

and wakefulness/sleepiness detectors have already been developed, and their fitting to trucks could be made compulsory.

That said, the Coroner Sumner did more than "report a trend" following the inquest into my nephew's death. Coroner Sumner's Rule 43 Report to the Lord Chancellor, to which a formal response must be made by Government within 56 days, calls for changes in the way that sleep apnoea amongst lorry drivers is dealt with:
* regular medical screening for all lorry drivers;
* amendment of the DVLA Medical Examination Report form to improve identification of undiagnosed sufferers from Obstructive Sleep Apnoea;
* fast track medical assessment of commercial drivers involved in road traffic collisions;
* better education of all drivers on the dangers of tiredness when driving, in the same manner as drink-driving campaigns;
* better education of commercial drivers to make them aware that a diagnosis of OSA is almost certainly not the end of their livelihood as a driver.

However, overall what is lacking is a "safe systems of work" approach to the problem; and it is truck operators, owner drivers, and the manufacturers of trucks that need to provide it.

Unfortunately, at present, Government relies on a defective process for licensing drivers of Large Goods Vehicles, rather than on applying that safe systems of work approach.

The latter would need the involvement of the Health and Safety Executive, which could require (but never has required) action on this problem from truck operators (and from owner drivers) under Section 3 of the Health and Safety at Work Act.

For more on this, see this document (which contains the Coroner Sumner's Rule 43 Report in full, along with a comprehensive report to the Inquest by Dr Dev Banerjee):

http://preview.tinyurl.com/4d6a5r

Seb Schmoller

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