There are a thousand and one reasons why every trucker should be concerned about his or her health. Relatively speaking, trucking is a dangerous work. In fact, about 12 percent and the highest total number of all work-related death are accounted for by the truck drivers. Research has also proven that truck drivers are five times more likely to die on the job than the average worker.
If you are still in doubt as to the overriding importance of health matters in trucking, you may want to look at the facts outlined below(although not exhaustive):
– Trucking is one of the most physically and psychologically demanding jobs in the world. Truck drivers spend up to 13 hours a day driving, and up to 16 hours a day engaged in various duties (including driving time) such as fueling, waiting for way bills, filling out POD (Proof of Delivery) forms, obtaining routine vehicle repairs and conducting mandatory vehicle inspections.
– Truckers spend the better part of their active professional away from and outside of the comfort of the home. Long-haul drivers often spend weeks away from home, spending their time off and sleeping at truck stops or rest areas.
– Truckers spend the better part of their lives away from those that matter the most (the family)
– Truckers are perpetually sedentary. They spend hours sitting and curled up behind the steering wheel sometimes hardly having time to unwind or get some blood flow back to the limbs. Many medical complications are traceable to this professionally-required posture.
– Truckers run against some of the most stringent targets and drive the hardest timelines. Loading is schedule-driven (which explain why many truckers stay up sometimes for several nights or hours on queue for loading) and delivery itself has time limits attached. Trip cycles too are driven by minimum turnaround benchmarks.
– For most truckers, eating well is almost an impossible task and eating on time seems like a fable. The nature of the job makes it extremely difficult for the trucker to determine what, where, when and how to eat. These unhealthy eating habits combined with other factors such as smoking, lack of exercise and work-related injuries contribute to the driver’s generally risk-prone lifestyle. The health implications of this are better left to the imagination.
– Truckers, aside maybe aviation pilots and shuttle scientists, face some of the harshest exposure to the weather elements. Driving truck/trailer combination and cargo with combined gross weights of 50-60 tons against elements such as extreme storms, wind, typhoon and heat and on terrains that are better described as mud roads or jagged planes makes trucking seem more like a job for superstars (could be exactly what truckers are).
The above explains why health and wellness are major issues in haulage and trucking.
Truck drivers desirous of outliving their jobs or having some quality years to enjoy the benefits accruing from years of labour should be interested in wellness both on and off the job.
Truckers wishing to stay alive and not add to the indices of death in active service should also care about developments regarding their health.
Business owners or owner-drivers should care about what happens to one of their most important assets. The cost of managing a downtime is by far in excess of the cost of preventing one. Many downtime experiences have been known to have their root cause in drivers’ wellness issues.
This month in Haulage Report Now, we shall be doing a close-up on some of these critical health issues common with professional truckers while also making useful recommendations on how to manage, mitigate or avoid them outrightly.
