Psychiatric illness, medication and driving: an audit of documentation

2015 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 171-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Gallagher ◽  
S. Shah ◽  
W. Abassi ◽  
E. Walsh

ObjectivesGuidelines on advising patients on fitness to drive have been published recently by the Road Safety Authority in collaboration with the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland. The aim of this audit is to assess if the new guidelines are being adhered to.MethodExamination of the documentation and adherence to the guidelines in the inpatient psychiatric unit, Mayo General Hospital.ResultsOf the 100 patients included in audit cycle one, none had any specific documentation about driving. One patient was admitted with alcohol misuse and was driving. On re-auditing, following presentation at academic meeting and education of team members on the guidelines, there was a minor improvement of 7%.ConclusionThere was no significant difference in documentation on re-audit. However, an increase of 7% is nonetheless encouraging. Information concerning driving should be a standard part of advice given to all psychiatric patients.

2019 ◽  
Vol 262 ◽  
pp. 05003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcin Budzynski ◽  
Krzysztof Wilde ◽  
Kazimierz Jamroz ◽  
Jacek Chroscielewski ◽  
Wojciech Witkowski ◽  
...  

Key to understanding the needs and tools of road infrastructure management for preventing runoff-road crashes or minimising their consequences, is to identify the hazards and sources of hazards caused by wrong or improper use of road safety devices and identify errors in the design, structure, construction and operation of road safety devices. Studying such an extended scope of the problem required fieldwork and surveys with road authorities, designers, road safety auditors and road maintenance services. An outline of new guidelines could only be developed after understanding the effects of restraint systems, the design, additional elements, type of road and safety barrier location on a road or engineering structure and the road and traffic conditions on their functionality and safety. The paper will present the preliminary results of this research (research project – ROSE). One way to understand the functionality of road safety devices is to build numerical models and conduct simulation tests of virtual crash tests. The article presents the scope of work conducted as part of an effort to develop new vehicle restraint system guidelines.


2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 61-65
Author(s):  
Low Fin ◽  
Nurfatin Suhaimi ◽  
Nur Nor ◽  
Amelia Ghani

The present study examined safe pedestrian behaviours according to the Malaysian Road Safety Education module among 7-year-old to 9-year-old children in Malaysia. A survey was conducted with a relatively large (n = 1206) random sample of children aged 7 to 9 years old, drawn from 24 selected schools in six states in Malaysia based on the highest numbers of crash cases. Analysis of one-way ANOVA revealed a statistically significant difference in safe pedestrian behaviours between different ages. Post hoc comparisons using the Tukey HSD test indicated that the mean score of safe pedestrian behaviours for 7-year-old children was significantly higher than that of 8-year-old children (p = .004) and 9-year-old children (p = .021). No statistically significant difference was revealed between the 8-year-olds and 9-year-olds (p = .859) at the 0.05 level. Although many children reported safe pedestrian behaviours, low levels of certain safe pedestrian behaviours were also reported – less than 30% of the children aged 7 to 9 reported to ‘always’ wear bright clothes, walk against the traffic, and wave at the drivers to cross the road. In addition, a small percentage (9.9-13.6%) of children aged 7 to 9 also reported to ‘always’ wear dark clothes at night, cross the street between parked cars, and run to cross the road. These findings may inform programs to improve children’s safe pedestrian behaviours.


1987 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 86-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary B Crouch

This article is based on research which was undertaken to determine the effectiveness of two types of group work in the assessment of acutely disturbed adult psychiatric patients. The effectiveness of groups for assessment was determined by comparing the occupational therapy assessments of patients after one group session with those assessments made by other professional team members over the period of one week. The study was carried out at two acute psychiatric units in Johannesburg. Thirty patients were assessed by the author and by four members of the team. The five assessments were compared for each patient by statistical analysis. The results indicate that there is no significant difference between the five assessments or between the assessments undertaken in the art groups and those undertaken in the discussion groups. The short-term assessments of patients during these two types of group work is therefore effective.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Bender ◽  
G. Coulson

ABSTRACT Collisions between vehicles and macropods pose problems for road safety, animal welfare and wildlife conservation in Australia. We tested the ShuRoo, which is marketed specifically to deter kangaroos from approaching vehicles. We recruited 18 fleet operators with vehicles travelling consistent routes over long distances in rural areas: 59 vehicles fitted with ShuRoos and 40 vehicles without ShuRooss to act as controls. Drivers kept a log of collisions with macropods over an average distance travelled of 46,131 km. The overall mean rate of collisions with macropods was 1.16 per 100,000 km, with no significant difference between vehicles with a ShuRoo (1.32 ± 0.51) versus those without the device (0.68 ± 0.39). Drivers have the capacity to change their behaviour as a coping strategy to the presence of wildlife on the road, but risk a rebound effect if they believe the ShuRoo manufacturer’s claims and do not modify their driving behaviour to match the context. Rather than retro-fitting an ill-conceived device like the ShuRoo, an integrated, inter-disciplinary approach is needed to resolve the pervasive problem of macropod-vehicle collisions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (11) ◽  
pp. 5899
Author(s):  
Yeonsoo Jun ◽  
Juneyoung Park ◽  
Chunho Yeom

This paper evaluates experimental variables for virtual road safety audits (VRSAs) through practical experiments to promote sustainable road safety. VRSAs perform road safety audits using driving simulators (DSs), and all objects in the road environment cannot be experimental variables because of realistic constraints. Therefore, the study evaluates the likelihood of recommendation of VRSA experimental variables by comparing DSs experiments and field reviews to secure sustainable road safety conditions. The net promoter score results evaluated “Tunnel”, “Bridge”, “Underpass”, “Footbridge”, “Traffic island”, “Sign”, “Lane”, “Road marking”, “Traffic light”, “Median barrier”, “Road furniture”, and “Traffic condition” as recommended variables. On the contrary, the “Road pavement”, “Drainage”, “Lighting”, “Vehicle”, “Pedestrian”, “Bicycle”, “Accident”, and “Hazard event” variables were not recommended. The study can be used for decision making in VRSA scenario development as an initial effort to evaluate its experimental variables.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 2039
Author(s):  
Juan F. Dols ◽  
Jaime Molina ◽  
F. Javier Camacho-Torregrosa ◽  
David Llopis-Castelló ◽  
Alfredo García

The analysis of road safety is critical in road design. Complying to guidelines is not enough to ensure the highest safety levels, so many of them encourage designers to virtually recreate and test their roads, benefitting from the evolution of driving simulators in recent years. However, an accurate recreation of the road and its environment represents a real bottleneck in the process. A very important limitation lies in the diversity of input data, from different sources and requiring specific adaptations for every single simulator. This paper aims at showing a framework for recreating faster virtual scenarios by using an Industry Foundation Classes (IFC)-based file. This methodology was compared to two other conventional methods for developing driving scenarios. The main outcome of this study has demonstrated that with a data exchange file in IFC format, virtual scenarios can be faster designed to carry out safety audits with driving simulators. As a result, the editing, programming, and processing times were substantially reduced using the proposed IFC exchange file format through a BIM (Building Information Modeling) model. This methodology facilitates cost-savings, execution, and optimization resources in road safety analysis.


Author(s):  
Puspa Raj Pant ◽  
Sudhamshu Dahal ◽  
Kannan Krishnaswamy ◽  
Sunil Kumar Joshi ◽  
Julie Mytton
Keyword(s):  

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 792-803
Author(s):  
Marit Buhaug Folstad ◽  
Eli Ringdalen ◽  
Halvard Tveit ◽  
Merete Tangstad

AbstractThis work investigates the phase transformations in silica (SiO2) during heating to a target temperature between 1700 °C and 1900 °C and the effect of SiO2 polymorphs on the reduction reaction 2SiO2 + SiC = 3SiO + CO in silicon production. Different heating rates up to target temperature have been used to achieve the different compositions of quartz, amorphous silica and cristobalite. The different heating rates had a minor effect on the final composition, and longer time at temperatures > 1400 °C were necessary to achieve greater variations in the final composition. Heating above the melting temperature gave more amorphous silica and less cristobalite, as amorphous silica also may form from β-cristobalite. Isothermal furnace experiments were conducted to study the extent of the reduction reaction. This study did not find any significant difference in the effects of quartz, amorphous silica or cristobalite. Increased temperature from 1700 °C to 1900 °C increased the reaction rate.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (11) ◽  
pp. 3661
Author(s):  
Noman Khan ◽  
Khan Muhammad ◽  
Tanveer Hussain ◽  
Mansoor Nasir ◽  
Muhammad Munsif ◽  
...  

Virtual reality (VR) has been widely used as a tool to assist people by letting them learn and simulate situations that are too dangerous and risky to practice in real life, and one of these is road safety training for children. Traditional video- and presentation-based road safety training has average output results as it lacks physical practice and the involvement of children during training, without any practical testing examination to check the learned abilities of a child before their exposure to real-world environments. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a 3D realistic open-ended VR and Kinect sensor-based training setup using the Unity game engine, wherein children are educated and involved in road safety exercises. The proposed system applies the concepts of VR in a game-like setting to let the children learn about traffic rules and practice them in their homes without any risk of being exposed to the outside environment. Thus, with our interactive and immersive training environment, we aim to minimize road accidents involving children and contribute to the generic domain of healthcare. Furthermore, the proposed framework evaluates the overall performance of the students in a virtual environment (VE) to develop their road-awareness skills. To ensure safety, the proposed system has an extra examination layer for children’s abilities evaluation, whereby a child is considered fit for real-world practice in cases where they fulfil certain criteria by achieving set scores. To show the robustness and stability of the proposed system, we conduct four types of subjective activities by involving a group of ten students with average grades in their classes. The experimental results show the positive effect of the proposed system in improving the road crossing behavior of the children.


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