National Driver Fatigue Week 21-27 February 2025

Member for Kiama Gareth Ward is this promoting National Driver Fatigue Week 21-27 February 2025 and highlighting road safety and driver fatigue strategies to save lives.

Mr Ward said that National Driver Fatigue Week’s aim is to promote driver fatigue intervention strategies to heavy vehicle drivers and prevent one in three fatalities on our roads.

“Roads and Transport agencies in Australia are focused on reducing fatalities by 50% by 2030 and aim to further reduce serious injury crashes by 30%. Improved road user behaviour within the safer people pillar of a safe systems approach is a key strategy of the 2030 National Road Safety Action Plan,” he said.

“Driver education to change a driver’s perceptions and provide solutions to fatigue when it strikes on the road is critical to success. The aim is to reduce fatal crashes attributed to fatigue.

“It has long been accepted by science that the only solution for fatigue is sleep and that a sleep debt will eventually need to be paid. Fatigue leads to microsleeps with fatal consequences,” Mr Ward said.

“The platform is the 15–20-minute power nap strategy. A power nap is a short sleep that terminates before deep sleep, it improves concentration and situation awareness.

The Power Nap campaign developed free resources for workplaces, community groups and individuals, at their request, to promote National Driver Fatigue Week. The communications toolkit is available at Resources - Power Nap

“The road to zero fatalities is a challenge and there is no greater challenge than the reduction in crashes attributed to driver fatigue,” Mr Ward concluded.