Establishing fitness to drive protocols following elective day surgery

Abstract

Abstinence from driving a motor vehicle is recommended for 24 hours following procedural sedation. Despite this, as many as 1 in 10 people drive in the first 24 hours after day surgery, and nearly the same amount report driving home immediately after they have been discharged form hospital.

Drivers are often guided by their treating physicians to abstain from driving until ‘physical and mental recovery is compatible with safe driving’, however, there is no clear standard on what constitutes compatibility with safe driving, nor what benchmark is considered acceptable in terms of physical and mental recovery.

This project aims to gather vital information about the performance-based effects of sedating-type medications on driving performance to provide treatment-relevant data to inform postoperative driving restrictions and inform patient discharge procedures.