A cool way to reduce road accidents

Rerfrigeration and air conditioning solutions specialist, WR Refrigeration, has seen a significant reduction in its reported accident rate after putting its drivers through the DriverMetrics online risk assessment plus additional risk awareness and driver training with driver safety experts, Peak Performance.

The Leicester-based business, which operates a national fleet of 380 cars and vans and primarily serves the UK retail food industry from a national network of 28 branches, witnessed a 55% improvement in its reported accident rate in the final quarter of 2006.

The success of the new risk awareness initiative came about following a recommendation from the company's insurer, Royal & SunAlliance (R&SA), which has a strategic partnership with Peak Performance.

In a bid to improve its insurance claims record and following R&SA's advice, WR Refrigeration opted to assess the risk characteristics of all its drivers using the DriverMetrics online risk assessment jointly developed by Cranfield University and Peak Performance, to better understand their drivers' attitudes to driving risk.

The ground-breaking DriverMetrics risk assessment uniquely uses psychometric principles to identify driving attitudes and characteristics, and thereby helps reduce driving risk and cut accidents. Its developers say it has been used successfully by dozens of companies and thousand of company drivers around the UK.

Dependent on the outcome of their DriverMetrics assessment, drivers had the opportunity to attend Peak's 'Driving in Mind' workshop, which helps drivers better understand their own driving behaviours and those of other drivers, and identifies why they are more or less likely to take risks on the road.

Those WR Refrigeration drivers who were assessed as 'high risk' undertook Peak's oneto- one, behind the wheel 'Personal Driver Coaching' course, which has been designed to help drivers identify and reduce the risks associated with their personality-based, behavioural and emotional driving factors.

Terry Pride, compliance director at WR Refrigeration, said: "We recognise our duty of care responsibility to our employees who drive for work, and have worked with our insurance company to deliver comprehensive road risk solutions for all our drivers to proactively reduce our levels of driving risk."

Steve Stokes, fleet risk manager at R&SA, said: "This is an excellent example of us working in conjunction with Peak Performance and one of our customers, to produce a safer driving environment. We recommended DriverMetrics to WR Refrigeration as part of the overall risk solution aimed at reducing their drivers' occupational road risk."

Richard Hill, strategic partnership manager at Peak Performance said: "We looked closely at the diverse nature of the WR Refrigeration fleet and the varied manner of its operation, and from that appraisal it was clear we needed to better understand the overall risk levels the drivers faced.

"Therefore, we used the DriverMetrics online risk assessment to assess the overall risk exposure, before the appropriate training and coaching was put in place to tackle the issues identified. Naturally, we have been delighted at the improvement in reported accident rates."

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