This week is Older Driver Safety Awareness Week (December 6–12, 2009). According to AOTA, the PR event:

aims to promote understanding of the importance of mobility and transportation to ensuring older adults remain active in the community—shopping, working or volunteering—with the confidence that transportation will not be the barrier to strand them at home.

Some topics for the week include family conversations about driving, driver screening & evaluations, driving equipment & adaptations, taking driving changes in stride, and life after driving.

More and more people need to address this issue, children of the elderly, neighbors, medical professionals, civic and legislative leaders, and the elderly themselves all need to take it head on. It is a problem that is not going to go away; in fact, it will continue to expand as we all continue to live longer. We want to preserve the driving abilities for as long as possible.

I am facing an issue with my father. He is about 80, has diabedes and congestive heart failure. At times his vision is impaired. He is pretty good about self-regulating. However, he lives alone, six hours away from me. He and I have spoken about it. We are open in our dialogue. He is not a risk taker and will not drive if he does not feel safe. For this reason I am blessed. He has other transportation options he can leverages, namely friends, for his trips to the store, bank, MD, post office.

I appreciate the leaders of AOTA and other agencies and associations that are doing their part to create awareness for this social issue. I also am grateful for DriveSafety and its willingness to do its part to help with the assessment and evaluation aspect of this situation.