Hello
Welcome to Drive Wise
We offer:
- Practical on-road OT driver assessment of current driving abilities.
- Facilitating return to driving after medical suspension of driver’s licence.
- Identification of strategies to enable safe driving such as vehicle modifications.
- Development of a capacity building program to support the learning to drive process.
About Drive Wise
WHAT IS OCCUPATIONAL THERAPY?
Occupational therapy is a health profession that focuses on promoting health and wellbeing, by enabling people to participate in the activities of everyday life. Occupational therapists work with people to identify barriers to participation and strategies to overcome these barriers so people can regain their ability to participate in the everyday activities they want or need to do.
They do this by assessing a person's functional skills and capacity (such as their movement/strength, sensation, thinking skills, vision and perception) and comparing these to the demands of the task/activity itself and the environment in which they complete it.
Once this has been established, an Occupational Therapist can help a person regain or continue participation in their daily activities by looking at ways to make the task less demanding, assisting people to learn new skills or regain lost skills to improve performance of the activity or modifying the environment to accommodate changed personal functional capacity.
Occupational therapy and driving
Driving is a complex everyday activity that many people value highly. It requires the ability to monitor and adapt rapidly to a wide range of different situations and environmental factors.
A person’s ability to participate in driving can be influenced by:
- accident, injury or illness
- congenital disabilities
- mental health disorders
- substance use
- factors associated with ageing, such as deteriorating eyesight
- lack of information about other transport options
When one of the above situations is present, decisions regarding a person's ongoing ability to drive safely are based on:
- a driver’s medical fitness to drive, as outlined by the Austroad's assessing fitness to drive standards (2022), usually assessed by a GP.
- the degree to which a driver's medical condition or injury has impacted on their functional skills needed to drive safely, assessed via an Occupational Therapy (OT) practical on-road driver assessment.
The OT driver assessment includes assessment of a driver’s sensory, physical and thinking skills required for driving to determine what symptoms may impact on safe driving. This is done initially through an off road assessment to screen for changes or difficulties in these areas followed by an on road driving assessment to observe how these changes actually present during performance of the driving task.
If difficulties and safety concerns are present, the occupational therapist will then use the information gathered to identify ways in which to assist the driver to continue or return to driving after a change in their previous function, if possible.
As part of the driver assessment, the occupational therapist will often make recommendations about driver rehabilitation, vehicle modifications and/or license conditions..