Manual Distractions of Ambulance Drivers: Light-and-siren vs. Non-light-and-siren Travel

摘要

Emergency medical services personnel are involved in more transportation accidents andhave higher fatality rates than do other professions, and traveling with light-and-siren isparticularly risky. One factor that might contribute to transportation accidents is driverdistraction. We investigated what kind of manual secondary tasks – distractions thatrequire the driver to take at least one hand off the steering wheel – ambulance driversface and compared the relative frequency and proportion of time spent in manualoperations not related to driving for light-and-siren travel vs. non-light-and-siren travel.The results indicate that ambulance drivers face more manual distractions when travelingwith light-and-siren than non-light-and-siren. In particular, operating the light-and-sirensystem is causing most of the manual distractions. We discuss the results and potentialimplication for practice.