Exploring the Health and Economic Burden Among Truck Drivers in Australia: A Health Economic Modelling Study.

Content Provider	Europe PMC
Author	Lee, Peter Xia, Ting Zomer, Ella van Vreden, Caryn Pritchard, Elizabeth Newnam, Sharon Collie, Alex Iles, Ross Ademi, Zanfina
Abstract	Background The transport and logistics industry contributes to a significant proportion of the Australian economy. However, few studies have explored the economic and clinical burden attributed to poor truck driver health. We therefore estimated the work-related mortality burden among truck drivers over a 10-year period. Methods Dynamic life table modelling was used to simulate the follow-up of the Australian male working-age population (aged 15–65 years) over a 10-year period of follow-up (2021–2030). The model estimated the number of deaths occurring among the Australian working population, as well as deaths occurring for male truck drivers. Data from the Driving Health study and other published sources were used to inform work-related mortality and associated productivity loss, hospitalisations and medication costs, patient utilities and the value of statistical life year (VoSLY). All outcomes were discounted by 5% per annum. Results Over 10 years, poor truck driver health was associated with a loss of 21,173 years of life lived (discounted), or 18,294 QALYs (discounted). Healthcare costs amounted to AU$485 million (discounted) over this period. From a broader, societal perspective, a total cost of AU$2.6 billion (discounted) in lost productivity and AU$4.7 billion in lost years of life was estimated over a 10-year period. Scenario analyses supported the robustness of our findings. Conclusions The health and economic consequences of poor driver health are significant, and highlight the need for interventions to reduce the burden of work-related injury or disease for truck drivers and other transport workers.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10926-022-10081-4.
Related Links	https://europepmc.org/backend/ptpmcrender.fcgi?accid=PMC9648998&blobtype=pdf
ISSN	10530487
Journal	Journal of Occupational Rehabilitation [J Occup Rehabil]
Volume Number	33
DOI	10.1007/s10926-022-10081-4
PubMed Central reference number	PMC9648998
Issue Number	2
PubMed reference number	36357754
e-ISSN	15733688
Language	English
Publisher	Springer US
Publisher Date	2022-11-10
Publisher Place	New York
Access Restriction	Open
Rights License	Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. © The Author(s) 2022
Subject Keyword	Truck driver Transport worker Productivity-adjusted life year Cost burden Disease burden
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Rehabilitation Occupational Therapy