Blog

Working as a bus driver is a sedentary and a stressful job. It would mean sitting for long hours in traffic with no time to stretch, making evasive maneuvers on cyclists and pedestrians. All just to provide an excellent customer services and to keep up with the time of schedule. And adding to that stress, the pressure of consciousness, knowing that the bus is full of people and their safety is in your hands. Most people would feel stressed in these conditions and too tired to go to the gym for a work out.

A bus driver health is a serious business industry issue, with many facing a battle of maintaining good health. It is likely that they need to work odd hours from early morning drives to late night trips, so it could be tempting to grab fast food, rather than eating a well-balanced diet. Research has shown that bus drivers have a higher risk of developing gastrointestinal, musculoskeletal and cardiovascular disorders compared to other occupations.

Fortunately, there are many ways to prevent bad bus driver health and improve your bus driver well–being for the days to come. Here are some of the ways to improve your bus driver health.

Provide Health Education

We all know how vital is the driver’s health in satisfying and functioning for the company’s daily operation. If you can make them expand effort by bike riding or walking to work, proper eating habits, and work out, by the use of exercise videos then they can keep being healthy .

You could also conduct a semi–regular health and nutritional seminars with an open forum, your company will greatly benefit from being aware and able to avoid the health risk of everyone. Not only it will provide health education but also you can address the issues in your company from the group discussions after the seminars.

Here are the Major Health Risk Factors that can affect the bus driver health:

Overweight – People who tend to be overweight are prone to have high blood pressure, high cholesterol level, difficulty of breathing and other related health problems.

Diabetes – As a result, your body cannot regulate the sugar level present in your blood. Thus it will increase your cholesterol level and increase the chance to have a heart problem.

Inactive – The heart is made up of muscles, it also needs exercises to stay healthy. Without making a regular exercise, it will increase the possibility to develop cardiovascular diseases.

Stress – It is one of the contributing factors to elevate someone’s blood pressure and adds to the chance of having a heart attack. Study has shown that stress can increase the possibility to enhance cancer cells in our body.

Smoking – A study shows that more than 50% of truck and bus drivers are smoking. Smokers have higher chance to have cardiovascular disorder and other related health problems. More people are now aware of the effect of smoking and many have started quitting. And people who quitted have significantly improved their health now than before.

However, in order for everything to be successful, it would require a combined effort between employer and employee. Once all are in sync, only then we could start to realise the goal of becoming healthy.

Providing Health Resources

Promote healthfulness by providing health resources and a wellness program. It will not be successful if employees don’t have the money, interest and time to participate. The programs outcome will rely on employees interests and motivations. You can easily offer a convenient health improvement opportunity once you understand their limitations. You should only suggest to the employees a reachable goal and make it as easy as possible so that they will take part of the wellness program. Establishing your company’s wellness program is a long program to keep the employees healthy.

For employers, arrange gym centres for a group pricing with wellness program to receive a much higher discount, or negotiate with schools since nowadays they have swimming pools and gymnasium facilities available. Hire aerobics or dance workout instructors to teach your employees at least two times a week. Once you established these resources, you have to check or monitor their progress to make the program a success. If they manage to put in the effort to get healthy then you will be able to boost your drivers output and company’s net profits.

Promote Healthy Eating Habits

We all understand how difficult it is to eat healthy or well balanced meals on a daily basis. It is even more difficult when you work odd hours with little time to spare in between your shifts. The most important thing they need to do is to stay hydrated and well nourished while driving either long or a short trip.

Encourage your drivers to prepare before starting their trip. Make them bring enough water and healthier snacks like fresh or hydrated fruits, mixed nuts, pumpkin seeds, jerky meat packets, kale chips and much more. These are healthy snacks that are good for their break time rather than getting to a vending machine or fast food restaurant.

A daily recommendations for food intake should include fruits, at least 100 grams of proteins, about 310 grams of carbohydrates and 30 grams of dietary fibres. However, according to data collected, above 50% of the people doesn’t even eat a single piece of fruit per day and instead they consume more than 30% of fat calories from the daily caloric recommendations.

There is also a consideration for different people needs different approaches. So how different should it be? Another approach is to frequently eat smaller portions, by reducing the quantity of intake and increase the number of times you eat, will help reduce weight and improve one’s health.

You can also make a weight loss challenge competition by putting an amount from the company or make them contribute every month for the pot money. After several months or a year whoever loses the most weight will receive the amount, that way they can support and discourage one another in eating junk foods.

There are so many ways to promote healthy eating habits to your drivers, if you can successfully drill it to them, then expect to have a much happier and healthier staff.

Promote Sports Event and Exercises

Another way to improve your driver health is to have a company sports event. By having a sporting event where they could play basketball, softball, volleyball, table tennis and other sports, just to create unconsciously physical exercises and to improve one’s health. It will also develop teamwork, build camaraderie and endurance, aids weight loss and teaches self discipline among themselves.

As the doctors says, having a regular exercise even reduced to the minimum time, can still reduce the risk of illness and improve one’s health. For just 10 to 20 minutes of physical exercise a day, at least three days a week, by walking, or jogging and bike riding. It can still produce cardiovascular benefits. All of this can be done either in a gym centre or just around the bus parking lot.

By making them active, it will reverse their deteriorating health from a sedentary lifestyle thus will help improve the driver health. Many of transportation operators have now resulted to promote sports event and exercises in their company to tackle the health issues of the drivers.

Here in eCoachManager we are dedicated to improve the management of your transportation business with having the benefits of cost effective, technologically advanced and easy to use all in one integrated system. So contact us for an online demo or FREE quotation.