Effects of safety pattern, cabin ergonomics, and sleep on work-related stress and burnout of city and transit bus drivers in Lahore, Pakistan

Abstract

The health and working environment of bus drivers is compromised in low-middle-income countries like Pakistan which leads to burnout and excessive Road Traffic Crashes. Hence, this study delves into factors affecting their safe operations from health and work environment perspectives and measures their associated stress and Burnout level. In a study of four hundred and ninety-nine (499), 86% city and 14% transit bus drivers are surveyed through a questionnaire. Stress is estimated for city and transit bus drivers, using the Effort/Reward Imbalance Model (ERI) of Siegrist, and burnout is calculated using the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (CBI). For the determination of important determinants, descriptive and regression analyses are conducted. Findings show that stress has emerged as a negative factor for the physical and psychological health of city and transit bus drivers. Results based on bus drivers’ responses suggest that organisational awareness and emphasis on health and safety levels can significantly reduce driver stress and burnout.

Practitioner Summary: This study explores burnout and work-related stress of bus drivers in Lahore (Pakistan). City and transit bus drivers were interviewed through a questionnaire, containing three sections, using different subjective ratings based upon their past reliability. Results indicate that stress in bus drivers emerged as a physical and psychological health-damaging factor.

Keywords:

• Bus drivers
• burn out
• BMI
• cabin ergonomics
• Lahore

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Table 1. Variables and definitions.

Notes

1 Scatter source of information from different newspapers, i.e. The News, Express Tribune, Dawn News.

2 Green line metro bus (length = 27km is operational since 2013. Orange Line metro train project (length = 27.1km) is under construction, while Blue and Purple line mass transit projects of Lahore Mass transit system is under planning phase.

3 Logistic Regression is a type of predictive model that can be used when the target variable is a categorical variable with two or more categories.

4 The reason for selecting simple linear regression for transit bus drivers is because no driver was reported with stress level >1. Hence only 1 class of stress (i.e. <1) is considered.

5 Center of Disease and Control: If BMI <18.5 underweight, if BMI = 18.5–24.9 it is healthy, if BMI = 25.0–29.9 it is overweight and above 30 BMI is termed as obese.

6 RMT = Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers is a British trade union covering transport sector.

7 Mann–Whitney U Test compares mean rank score if variables are divided in to only two classes. It is non-parametric test.