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Older driver medical assessment: Validating a screening toolkit for use in general practice

Katharine WALLIS, Geoff SPURLING, Louise BASSINGTHWAIGHTE, Janelle GRIFFIN and Nicole WEIR

Family doctors are often tasked with assessing fitness to drive in older drivers. As the population ages there are more older drivers. With age cognitive, motor and sensory function can decline potentially affecting fitness to drive. Assessing fitness to drive is important for protecting public safety. Yet some family doctors are not comfortable assessing fitness to drive citing concern to maintain relationships and about the impact that driving cessation can have on an older person’s wellbeing and independence, and poor access to on-road driving assessments. An objective measure could help to both inform clinical judgement and support maintaining relationships. We developed the 3-Domains screening toolkit that tests across the three functional domains essential for driving using tests that are feasible in general practice: sensory (Snellen visual acuity), motor (functional reach), and cognitive (road signs recognition test). The toolkit uses as online calculator to generate a predictive score that is the likelihood an older driver would pass a specialist occupational therapist driving assessment (%) based onTo improve accuracy of the toolkit predictive equation.Validation study in specialist Occupational Therapy Driving Assessment and Rehabilitation Service. Participants are older drivers referred by their family doctor for driving assessment including on-road driving test. Data includes demographics, visual acuity, functional reach, road signs recognition, Trail Making Test B, Rapid Pace Walk Test, Montreal Cognitive Assessment, Adelaide Driving Self-efficacy scale, previous incidents, and assessment outcome. Data analysis: Predictive validity will be displayed with absolute numbers and percentages. A receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve will be produced, and the area under the ROC curve calculated. Driving assessment outcome will be dichotomized into pass/fail categories with “conditional” merged with “fail”.Data collection is ongoing.Older driver medical assessment sometimes requires family doctors to balance their responsibility to the older driver against their responsibility to protect public safety.The 3-Domains screening toolkit could be used to support older driver medical assessment, informing clinical judgement and supporting communication about the need for further on-road testing and to plan for eventual driving cessation.