The NHVR has released its 2023 Heavy Vehicle Safety Strategy Action Plan which sets out the key safety priorities for the next 12 months. More incentives for the transport operators on AFM (Advanced Fatigue Management), EWD is being promoted too.

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The Action Plan has five broad actions to improve heavy vehicle safety.

These five actions are:

1. Delivering safer and tailored fatigue risk management outcomes;
2. Empowering industry to better manage safety in their business;
3. Delivering tailored regulatory interventions to drive positive safety change;
4. Influencing the regulatory framework to promote the adoption of safer, cleaner, and more efficient vehicles and technologies; and
5. Providing input into government policy decisions that affect the safety and productivity of the heavy vehicle industry.

Under point 1 “Delivering safer and tailored fatigue risk management outcomes” we can see a push to get more operators onto Advanced Fatigue Management including benefits for the use of “Fatigue and Distraction Detection Technology” which seem to be part of the broader push for a more risk based Heavy Vehicle National Law, similarly the NHVR in this Action Plan is looking to increase the uptake of Electronic Work Diaries (EWDs).

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Fatigue, distraction technology, EWDs, work / rest hour monitoring systems and other digital tools generate events that need to be investigated or reviewed and where an event is a breach, corrective / preventative actions need to be taken. 

This whole process also needs to be documented and recorded for every event otherwise the system may be just documenting the evidence that the business is failing to take reasonably practicable steps to ensure safety - fear of prosecution for administration errors is often behind businesses not taking up these technologies and getting the productivity benefits.

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A problem with many digital / telematics / GPS systems is the false breaches or duplicate events that are generated, the supervisors or administrators need to wade through the false data to find the actual breaches that need action and then take and document the appropriate action. 

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At Unavin we understand Heavy Vehicle National Law compliance and administration, data integrations / analytics and automation. 

We can remove the noise from the data and automatically document the entire process from event prefiltering, event investigation through to corrective actions, such as, system automatically generated file notes / warning letters for drivers.

Unavin - your compliance sorted.

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View the Heavy Vehicle Safety Strategy Action Plan 2023

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