Work Package 5 – Rehabilitation
Work Package-leader: Birgit Bukasa (Kuratorium für Verkehrssicherheit), Austria
Starting Point
Suspension of driving license, fines and/or imprisonment of drivers having committed serious offences or accidents while being impaired due to alcohol or drugs do not necessarily result in behavioural change. Thus, so-called rehabilitation measures, above all psychological programmes focusing on the individual problem behaviour, have been developed in order to avoid re-offences in traffic, the first already in the 1970ies in certain Member States (Germany and Austria). Meanwhile a variety of different rehabilitation schemes are available and there exists a large amount of knowledge and experience in some Member States regarding rehabilitation schemes. For the time die EU-project ANDREA (Analysis of Driver Rehabilitation Programmes) focused on the rehabilitation issue and documented the principal effectiveness of certain rehabilitation courses (minus 50 % reduction of recidivism rate). Yet, there is still too less information available in order to advance or support this approach on EU-level.
Aim
The overall aim of work package 5 is to increase knowledge as regards rehabilitation of drivers with drunk-driving or drug-driving offences. Moreover, the research will provide fundamentals for establishing adequate and effective rehabilitation measures throughout Member States according to uniform defined criteria and quality standards.
Tasks
The research activities of work package 5 are subdivided into two tasks:
5.1: State of the art
This task will give an overview on existing rehabilitation (RH) schemes in the Member States including the following topics:
- Identification of different types of driving under influence of psychoactive substances, above all mentioning i) drivers under the influence of alcohol, ii) drivers under the influence of illicit drugs, iii) drivers in substitution treatment. Additional aspects such as consumption pattern and multiple substance intake will be considered as well.
- Review of assessment procedures that assign drivers to specific rehabilitation measures. Thereby, it will be mentioned whether the assessment only includes an assignment decision regarding a specific rehabilitation measure or a fitness-to-drive decision (i.e. if a DUI may continue driving or not) as well.
- Investigation of the different rehabilitation approaches which are applied in the Member States at present, ranging from psychologically oriented driver improvement programmes to addiction treatment, substitution therapy or other measures, like electronic monitoring or alcohol ignition interlock systems. The rehabilitation programmes will be analysed regarding their aims, target group(s), their contents and methods, their efficiency according to published evaluation studies. Frame conditions such as duration, setting, voluntarily vs compulsory participation will be mentioned as far as they are considered necessary for the success of a measure.
Task 5.2: Good practice
This task will have the following focuses:
- In-depth-study of successful vs non-successful course participation. In this context the reasons of drivers who participated in rehabilitation programmes but had another alcohol related offence will be analysed in detail.
- Analysis of existing quality management systems in this field. The research will focus on the major aspects such as quality of the rehabilitation programmes or measures themselves, skills of the providers of rehabilitation programmes, quality regarding the process of allocating drivers to rehabilitation measures, quality of governmental monitoring and supervision.
- Based on the outcomes having obtained from task 5.1 and 5.2 so far an integrated evaluation instrument will be developed. It will provide uniform criteria for judging a rehabilitation scheme regarding adequacy, effectiveness and quality.
- By means of the integrated evaluation instrument rehabilitation schemes, applied in Member States at present, will be validated. Thus, information will be obtained regarding successful intervention schemes but also which actions have to be taken in order to improve less successful rehabilitation measures. Besides, information will be available which rehabilitation schemes should be imposed to the specific alcohol or drug related problem group of drivers.
Methods
Literature analyses, questionnaires and interviews, empirical data analyses, expert hearings, workshops.
Research team
Members of work package 5 are experts from Austria, Belgium, France, Germany and Greece.