Occupational Mobility – Identification and Tests of Prevention approches

Status:

completed 05/2019

Aims:

Increased mobility requirements result in increased work-related traffic and mobility accidents. Significant accident-prone situations relate to the driving environment, the traffic environment and the traffic situation as well as the vehicle. In addition, the business environment, just as e.g. the stress levels, the work organization, the amount of trips required and the possibility of using less hazardous vehicles are essential. Above all, the situation while driving is of particular importance for accident prevention. Yet, the scientific investigations dealing with the strain, stress and dangers during the trip are scarce, aside from a few isolated approaches. However, this is where successful intervention approaches are needed to reduce the number of accidents.

The aim of the BestMobil-project is to understand the strain, stresses and risks of work-related trips, to identify empirically verified preventive measures for work-related mobile jobs, and last but not least to derive recommendations for companies and institutions, especially accident insurance agencies.

The target group of the project are mobile workers. The following occupational groups have been selected as representatives: ambulant care, service/assembly, sales/consulting and emergency services.

Activities/Methods:

GUROM (www.gurom.de) is one of the main analysis tools in the project. In addition to expert surveys and literature reviews, GUROM captured the typical burdens and hazards of mobile work. Profound insights were gained with the help of work system analyses, diary studies, driving observations during a work shift and recording of physiological stress correlates.

Results:

We found different stress and strain results in the specific types of occupations, which are closely related to the working and traffic environments and situations. On one hand, employees in ambulant care suffer from the effects of very many short trips with very exhausting and different challenges from the patients or clients visited. On the other hand, occupational consultants experience on their longer trips very different strains, often resulting from the traffic situation, such as traffic jams or near misses. Emergency services experience very different types of stress and strain, depending on the purpose of the trip, the clients, the working and driving conditions. In quite a few instances the organizational factors, such as working hours substitutes, clearness of communication, seem to have the biggest impact on experienced stress. Especially noteworthy is the result, that even in driving-times are experienced as "relaxing", which the physiological data show a higher pulse rate and variability, suggesting that driving is a more physically challenging type of activity than often assumed. Additional individual profiles support the general notions and demonstrate the effects longitudinally.

The resulting Intervention measures are located in the technical as well as in the organizational and personal area. They range from simple technical upgrades of the vehicles to road safety circles and driving safety trainings. In total, over 130 already evaluated intervention measures/best practice examples were collected.

In addition, a large number of methods and instruments were developed that allow each company to assess the stress and strain of their enployees in mobile work relatively uncomplicated and at low costs. These results in turn help to develop prevention measures that are person-situation- and job-specific.

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