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Mental disorder and professional driving

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Simon Payne
Affiliation:
Mapperley Hospital, Nottingham NG3 6AA
Alan S. Lee
Affiliation:
University Hospital, Nottingham NG7 2UH
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Recently several cases have drawn our attention to problems associated with professional driving and mental disorder. All drivers are responsible for informing the licensing authority of any disability likely to cause them to drive hazardously. Medical Aspects of Fitness to Drive (Raffle (ed.), 1985) gives detailed guidelines to help doctors advise their patients. Those relating to ordinary licence holders appear intuitively correct and most psychiatrists would give similar advice without reading them. However, the guidelines for vocational drivers, especially holders of Public Service Vehicle (PSV) and Heavy Goods Vehicle (HGV) licenses, are more stringent because of the serious consequences when accidents occur. The guidelines follow those of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, revised in 1983.

Type
Personal columns
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1992

References

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Silverstone, T. (1988) The influence of psychiatric disease and its treatment on driving performance. International Clinical Psychopharmacology, 3(suppl. 1), 5966.Google ScholarPubMed
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