Mr Purple wrote: ↑Wed Nov 08, 2023 3:00 pm
Straight out of the 'Australian Fitness to Drive' book.
Insulin Treated Diabetes.
A person is not fit to hold an unconditional licence.
A conditional licence may be considered to at least two yearly review providing whether the criteria are met:
- The condition is satisfactorily controlled.
- there is no recent history of a 'severe hypoglycaemic event'.
- The person is following a treatment regimen that minimises the risk of hypoglycaemia and
- The person experiences early warning symptoms of hypoglycaemia.
So this is covered reasonably well in there.
While there are some situations where it would be difficult to tell the onset of hypoglycaemia they are relatively unusual (that's what they're insinuating has caused this crash). I would suggest that there may have been a series of very poor decision made on the day otherwise - including potentially the speed with which the vehicle was driven. Looking at the intersection and location on google maps suggest there was a fair bit involved.
I agree this individual should not be driving again for the foreseeable future.
I’m sure that the antecedents to this tragedy will be a complex train of unfortunate events, like most large scale disasters (trains, planes and automobiles) there are usually multiple contributing factors.
The Australian Fitness to Drive book is provided free of charge to most or all GP clinics in Australia.
And as was mentioned a few posts above, (elderly) people do sometimes “doctor shop” to find a GP who will give them the tick in the box.
This scenario most commonly occurs in urban areas where their “usual” GP has told them that it’s time to give up driving but there are plenty of other GP’s in the adjacent suburbs who are less familiar with the patients history.
It’s not hard to postulate solutions to many of these problems.
The most obvious solution would be to make it mandatory for ALL Insulin dependent diabetics to have their drivers license renewal assessment done by a DIABETES SPECIALIST (Endocrinologist)
Yes this would be an added expense to either the driver or to Medicare but look at all the expensive stuff that Medicare or NDIS does pay for already.
I would rather see my tax dollars go to preventing any future Daylesford disaster scenario than some other things that consumes mega public dollars.
I also might add that I suspect that this disaster would not have occurred if the vehicle was not an Automatic transmission car.
A manual transmission car would probably have stalled and stopped before the full extent of the carnage occurred.