Use of Fitness to Drive Screening Tool

To enable family members or friends, in the USA and Canada, to detect at-risk older drivers, Dr. Classen and colleagues, developed and tested the Fitness-to-Drive Screening Measure (FTDS), a user friendly on-line tool http://fitnesstodrive.phhp.ufl.edu/ (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site..  Family members, caregivers, or friends who had driven with the driver in the last three months, may rate the drivers’ difficulties by completing 54 screening questions. After completing the questions a keyform or rating profile of each driver is produced which includes a classification of the driver into one of three categories: at-risk driver, routine driver, or accomplished driver.  Based on the specific driver category, recommendations-- the logical next steps for family members, friends or clinicians-- are suggested for each driver. These recommendations entail guidelines for continued fitness to drive, seeking interventions, or starting conversations about stopping driving. The FTDS has been translated into Japanese and Korean with demonstrated psychometric support for the Korean version. A shorter version has been developed (32 items) with excellent predictive validity of fitness to drive outcomes. This course will discuss each of these core activities and apply content information to an actual case study.

Prerequisites: None

AOTA Classification Codes

Category 1: Domain of OT – Occupation/ IADLs
Category 2: Occupational Therapy Process – Approaches to intervention

Target Audience

Occupational therapy generalists and specialists, driver rehabilitation specialists, driver educators, specialty practitioners, nurse practitioners, and private practice health care professionals

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this course, learners will be able to:

• Conceptualize the rationale for developing the FTDS
• Operationalize and use the FTDS as a screening tool for facilitating clinical reasoning skills in fitness to drive decisions
• Administer the FTDS, with a proxy rater of an at-risk drivers seen in the clinic, to make informed decisions about fitness to drive.
• Synthesize the use of the FTDS as a clinical decision-making tool based on the findings from a case-study
• Articulate how the FTDS can be used as a supplement to the gold-standard on-road assessment.