Tailored driving advice

In Belgium, you can drive a car if two conditions are met:

you are competent to drive (i.e. you have a valid driving licence) and
You are medically fit to drive.

The law stipulates that the doctor gives a ruling on medical fitness to drive. If you are not found medically fit to drive, you are not allowed to drive.

The ruling on medical fitness to drive belongs to professional secrecy and is not passed on to other non-medical authorities. As a participant, you own the professional secrecy and may pass on this opinion yourself if it is to your advantage.

The doctor has the option of delivering Form VII to the participant in certain cases whereby the participant must surrender his driving licence at the Population Department of the town hall.

There are four advice options. From a culture of care, each advice is a thorough consideration between the risk of an accident and the impact on quality of life.

Nevertheless, we take this opportunity to remind you that driving may one day stop and it is best to prepare for it ('advance planning for driving retirement').

1. Positive driving advice

In this case, we encourage you to continue. During your global evaluation, we did not find any insurmountable problems or bottlenecks. We advise you to use the car sufficiently often (more than 3,000 km per year) to maintain the current status of your driving and functional skills.

This advice may be granted for a definite or indefinite period. In the former case, you will be invited to revisit our centre at the end of the defined period for re-evaluation of your driving skills and driving safety.

2. Positive driving advice subject to training on proven bottlenecks

This advice does not identify any major insurmountable problems. However, we have seen some bottlenecks that can be remedied with specific training. The most common bottlenecks are viewing behaviour (mirrors!) and assessing potentially dangerous situations in advance. For the sake of preserving your own mobility, training will be proposed from the centre in such cases. This training is individual and specifically focused on the identified bottleneck. This training can take place at a driving school of your choice.

3. Extinction scenario

We advise an extinction scenario when we see multiple bottlenecks in both the cognitive skills tests and the driving evaluation. This advice is often given when we do not expect any benefit from training because of absence of learning ability. In this case, there is usually an expected progressive decline in key skills as seen in an evolving dementia. The extinction scenario provides an opportunity to prepare for a definitive short-term stop.

4. Negative advice: driving stop

Here we advise you to stop driving. For example, we have identified problems where you do not meet the minimum legal standards (e.g. inadequate vision) or we have identified attention problems both in the skills tests and when driving on the road. Inadequate understanding of your own driving performance can also be an important argument for giving a negative driving advice. This advice is not given lightly. That decision is made on the basis of a comprehensive measurement that has shown that the problem is too serious.

Working together to find alternatives in case of a negative driving advice

If you receive a negative driving advice from us, we are aware of the negative impact of losing your mobility. Together with you, we will then look for transport alternatives. Usually, elderly people travel fixed routes within fixed times for which transport alternatives probably exist. We then put you in touch with initiatives from De Lijn and the MAV (Mobility Centre Adapted Transport).

Our Centre Samen Veilig Mobiel is

a medical initiative that aims to provide an answer to a social question and originated from the care sector.
not a government initiative, but can rely on good cooperation with the VIAS institute.

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