What are the health needs of taxi drivers?

Problem

Many men, including those at high risk of poor health and especially those from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, have low rates of help-seeking and are frequently outside the scope of community-based health interventions. One strategy for delivering health interventions to high-risk, hard-to-reach groups is by focusing on occupational settings with a high proportion of the target population. In Australian, as elsewhere in the world, taxi-driving is an overwhelmingly male-dominated occupation with the majority of workers born overseas. Taxi drivers have multiple risk-factors for poor mental and physical health, including exposure to abuse and threats to personal safety, long and irregular working hours, unstable income, sedentary lifestyle and changing regulations. They also have very low rates of help-seeking for health problems. Despite these risk-factors taxi drivers are a largely neglected population with a dearth of existing literature on their health needs and no documented interventions targeting this at-risk population. This study examines the prevalence of health risk factors, psychological distress and approaches to help-seeking among men working as taxi drivers. It is the first stage of a larger project which aims to develop appropriate health interventions for men working in the taxi industry.

Approach

Ten-minute face-to-face survey interviews will be conducted with 375 taxi drivers recruited from the Melbourne airport holding yard, a regional taxi network depot and Victorian Taxi Association functions. The survey includes the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K10), the Exposure to Trauma Questionnaire, the Oslo Social Support Scale and questions on smoking, exercise and health seeking behaviour. All measures are comparable with readily available population level data collected by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Findings

Results will be available in May 2016. We will report the results of the survey and compare the prevalence of psychological distress, exposure to trauma, social support, smoking and exercise in Victorian taxi drivers with prevalence rates in the general population (adjusted for sex and age).

Consequences

This study is a partnership between researchers at the University of Melbourne and the Victorian Taxi Association. The results of the study will be used to identify the most important health issues facing men working in the taxi industry. The information gained from this needs analysis survey will be used to develop a health intervention for this typically hard to reach population.