National Distracted Driving Awareness Month

Lisa Bohrer presents "Don't Text and Drive" to a
group of elementary school students.

Safe driving is about more than two hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road.  It is about exclusively focusing on the task of driving.  When drivers engage in two activities that require a great amount of mental focus, the brain quickly switches between those tasks sequentially.  As a result, the brain suffers from inattention blindness.  Drivers using cell phones to talk or text look out the windshield, but do not see up to 50% of the driving environment.  In fact, the brain is so overloaded that not all critical driving cues such as red lights, stop signs and pedestrians are delivered to the brain.

“Joe was a vivacious 12 year old boy.  On a January day in 2004, Joe’s mother was driving him to an after-school activity when a 20 year old woman ran a red light and slammed into their car, killing Joe.  The driver was talking on her cell phone at the time of the crash.  She passed four cars and a school bus that were all stopped at the red light, but never applied her brakes.  Witnesses say she was looking straight out the front window.  She didn’t see the red light because she was distracted by her conversation.  Joe was killed because of a cell phone conversation.”(www.focusdriven.org)

If you are tempted to use your cell phone when driving:

•          Change your voicemail greeting to indicate you are driving and will call back when safely parked.

•          Put your phone in your trunk or glove box.

•          Turn your phone to “silent”.

•          If you need to contact someone, pull over to a safe location and put our vehicle in “park” before dialing.

Fifty-seven percent of drivers recognize talking on cell phones is a very serious threat to their personal safety, yet 2 out of 3 admit to talking on their cell phones in the past month  (according to results from a AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety survey).

For more information, visit www.focusdriven.org.

This article was submitted by Lisa Bohrer, R.N.,BC, the Community Health and Wellness Manager for the PharmaCare Network. She is available to speak on various health and wellness topics. For more information, contact her at 301.689.2909 or lbohrer@3ipc.com