Safety Measures to Prevent Injuries to Your Fleet Truck Drivers

Light-duty fleet truck drivers face the risk of serious accidents and injuries while on the job. The legal and financial risk is transferred to the company, who’s on the hook for paying damages, fines, court fees, and OSHA violations. Those costs skyrocket when someone is hurt.

Risk doesn’t stop at vehicular accidents, though. Fleet drivers often suffer from personal injuries resulting from slips, trips, falls, improper lifting, and more. Just like with a vehicular accident, the company is on the line for workers comp while their driver recovers in a hospital bed.

These accidents don’t have to happen to your drivers, and you don’t have to deal with this cost of loss. You can avoid this situation through proper truck driver injury prevention tactics and OSHA training.

What Risk of Injury Do Light-Duty Drivers Face?

Regardless of your industry, your drivers are at risk.

Delivery drivers face the risk of broken bones, serious muscle tears, repetitive stress injuries, and life-altering back injuries from improper lifting. 

Municipal/government workers often suffer from fractures, crush injuries from heavy objects, back injuries from improper lifting, and slip, trip, and fall injuries.

Some of the most common injuries for HVAC workers are sprains, strains, and contusions from poor body mechanics and not paying attention to their environment.

The number one most common injury for pest control techniques is from slipping, tripping, and falling.

All this to say, if you have light-duty drivers in your fleet, they face risk and so do you.

Check Out These 8 Light-Duty Training Courses You Can Use For Your Safety Meetings

Why Do These Injuries Happen?

Looking at the above examples, we see some common threads. The most common accidents are:

• Sprains, strains, and muscle tears
• Lower back injuries from improper lifting
• Injuries from slips, trips, and falls.

Of course, if you want to prevent these injuries, you need to get to the source of why they happen. We’ve done the hard work for you. In our thirty years of experience in the transportation industry, we know what causes these common workplace injuries.

Most often, personal injuries at your fleet will happen because of your drivers:

• Lift with their back instead of their legs
• Try to lift something that’s too heavy for them
• Don’t pay attention to their environment and, as a result, slip or trip
• Don’t use proper techniques for getting in and out of vehicles, and as a result, fall and get hurt
• Don’t properly adjust their seats and, eventually, suffer from chronic back pain

All of these situations are entirely avoidable. You just need to implement injury prevention training at your company.

How Injury Prevention Training Works

You need to train your employees on defensive driving and preventing accidents while behind the wheel. You need to train them on preventing personal injuries as well.

We recommend this takes several forms:

• Online self-directed lessons focused on preventing injuries from improper lifting and slips, trips, and falls
• In-person classroom training focused on industry-specific injury prevention topics
• Hands-on training focused on lifting techniques and proper seat adjustment
• Monthly refresher training on the most important injury prevention topics

A program like The Fleet Safety Course can tackle 90% of your most pressing issues. The Fleet Safety Courses offers professionally-made online training. It covers topics such as:

• Protecting your back during work
• Proper lifting techniques to prevent injuries
• How to avoid slips, trips, and falls

When you implement a program like The Fleet Safety Course, you’ll enjoy a reduction in accidents and employee downtime. This will quickly lead to a massive return on investment.