Driving: Sleep Apnoea

(asked on 10th September 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what estimate he has made of the number of road accidents caused by drivers affected by obstructive sleep apnoea.


Answered by
Rachel Maclean Portrait
Rachel Maclean
This question was answered on 15th September 2020

The Department does not collect data on drivers affected by obstructive sleep apnoea in road accidents specifically.

There were 1,528 reported road accidents involving personal injury where a contributory factor of driver fatigue was reported in Great Britain in 2018.

Detailed final statistics on reported personal injury road accidents in Great Britain for 2019 will be published on 30 September 2020.The latest annual published statistics are for 2018.

Contributory factors assigned by police officers do not assign blame for the accident to any specific road user, however they do provide some insight into why and how road accidents occur. They give an indication of which factors the attending officer thought contributed to the accident. Officers do not need to carry out a full investigation of the incident before allocating contributory factors; they usually use professional judgement about what they can see at the scene. Not all accidents are included in the contributory factor data; only accidents where the police attended the scene and reported at least one contributory factor are included.

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