EPA-1093 – Driving Assessment in Dementia – A Literature Review

Abstract

Introduction:

Driving is an essential activity of daily living for many patients. A diagnosis of dementia is likely to affect one's ability to continue driving safely due to cognitive decline. It is the role of the memory services team to inform the patient of the above, assess their risk and advise patients about their driving accordingly. Furthermore given that there are currently no gold standard assessment tools available, the method by which patient risk is assessed is often left of the discretion of the assessor. This literature review looks at assessment of driving to see if there is an effective method that could be adopted by memory service assessors.

Objectives:

To review literature with regards to assessing competency of driving in patients with dementia (pre and post disclosure).

Aims:

To see if there are effective measures, tools or assessment criteria that can effectively determine if a patient is competent to continue driving.

Methods:

PubMed and OvidSP search using ‘driving assessment’ and ‘dementia’ as search criteria for journal publications in English over the past five years.

Results:

The search gave 60 papers from pubmed and 14 from OvidSP. 12 papers met the criteria for selection.

Conclusions:

There are many different tools that can be used to assess cognition, each with varying ability to identify those patients who are at risk when continuing to drive. The problem lies not only in detecting those at risk but there is also the issue over validation for the tests that are available