Enhanced pass plus has been designed to reduce the number of young people involved in road collisions and to influence their behaviours by providing them with additional skills to enable them to identify, manage and avoid risk.
Themes
- Preventing mortality
- Road safety
Locality
North Yorkshire
Aims
- Enhanced pass plus has been developed to reduce the over-representation of young and newly qualified drivers in road crashes and casualties; and
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It aims to influence young people's behaviours by equipping them with additional skills to enable them to identify, manage and avoid risk whilst driving or whilst travelling as a passenger.
Details
The project is an enhanced version of the Driving Standards Agency's Pass Plus scheme, designed to address the shortfalls of that scheme by addressing attitudinal and behavioural elements that affect how young novice drivers assess and manage risks once they are qualified and, therefore, unsupervised drivers.
As well as completing the six in-car training modules of Pass Plus participants must also attend a new driver discussion group. Led by an experienced road safety professional, they work with a group of their peers to identify the reasons why new drivers crash. Using case studies and themes, they work out how to identify potentially risky situations and what they can do to manage or avoid those risks e.g. how to manage a group of friends travelling in your car and urging you to take risks or distracting you from your driving tasks.
The driving instructors are selected and specially trained to adjust their training style to deliver the in-car training using coaching techniques. This enables them to deliver using appropriate methods for this post-test training. They can then highlight the most frequent causes of collisions and use scenarios that relate to real world driving.
The course is currently jointly funded by candidates themselves and with funding from the performance reward grant, which is available up to the end of March 2014. Independent evaluation of this scheme has demonstrated its effectiveness in achieving these aims when compared to the standard Pass Plus course.
How will this case study improve health and reduce health inequalities?
Young novice drivers are over- represented in serious and fatal road collisions and casualties. Road deaths are a significant cause of premature death for young people aged 17-24 years, forming nine per cent of the population but 20 per cent of road casualties. Their exposure to risk is greatest on rural A and B class roads - which comprise the majority of the routes to higher education and work for young people living and working in North Yorkshire. This is part of the essential geography of the county, therefore measures are needed to influence the behaviours contributing to those risks and thus reduce them.
Contact details
North Yorkshire County Council 95 Alive
Tel: 0845 8 72 73 74
Email: 95alive@northyorks.gov.uk
Web: www.roadwise.co.uk
