SHIFTing Gears to improve health: can we support professional drivers to sit less and move more?

A focus of the lecture will be her impactful research on professional drivers. She will provide an overview of the health inequalities experienced by HGV drivers – an essential, yet under-served, occupational group in terms of health promotion efforts.

She will describe the development, evaluation and implementation of the SHIFT programme, and her ongoing work which aims to change policy to create healthier working environments and cultures for all professional drivers – leading to improvements in drivers’ health and road safety.

About the lecturer

Professor Stacy Clemes’ research focuses on the development, implementation and evaluation of behaviour change interventions designed to encourage people to sit less and move more.

She has investigated the impact of sit-stand desks in the classroom and workplace, along with family and community-based activity interventions. Following the pandemic, her research has focused on the effect of home and hybrid working – and their potential influence on workers’ activity levels, sitting time, sleep and dietary behaviours.

For the past decade, she has led a large programme of research, focusing on hard-to-reach and at-risk occupational groups – particularly professional drivers. This research led to the development of the Structured Health Intervention For Truckers (SHIFT) – a multicomponent programme for HGV drivers designed to promote physical activity and positive lifestyle changes.

The SHIFT Programme is being scaled-up as a training module for use across the logistics sector – and will be modified to suit other professional drivers. Stacy and her colleagues hope their work will have long-term, positive impacts on professional drivers’ health, facilitated by a policy-level change in driver training provision – leading to improvements in road safety for everyone.