"So much of the medicine we're able to do in a preventive way depends on the relationship. So we would far rather want to maintain the relationship and be able to work with the patient on improving their medical condition. And somehow reporting them does seem to interfere with that."
Redelmeier said some doctors insist that people who are unfit to drive neglect their health and rarely seek medical care. Therefore, the argument continues, people who are seeing a doctor regularly probably aren't the drivers who need to be taken off the road.
"They say: 'Well, you know, there are a lot of bad drivers out there but they're not in my practice,"' he noted.
But in the analysis, the researchers found that wasn't the case. Most of the drivers - 85 per cent - had seen a doctor in the year preceding their crash. In fact, 14 per cent had seen a doctor in the week leading up to the accident.
In the five years prior to their accidents, the 596 drivers who had reportable conditions had seen doctors a total of 20,505 times. That's an average of 34 times apiece over five years or nearly seven doctor visits a year each.
"Our main finding is that almost all of these drivers had previously seen a physician. So just because they're neglecting their driving does not mean they're neglecting their health," Redelmeier said.
"There's a huge missed opportunity to make our roads safer."
A commentary written by Dr. Shawn Marshall of the University of Ottawa's department of epidemiology and community medicine suggested it is difficult for doctors to know when to intervene.
"At the level of the individual patient, it remains challenging to assess the impact of a particular condition on driving ability," said Marshall, who is a lead investigator on CanDRIVE, an interdisciplinary research program aimed at improving the safety of older drivers.
"As the present researchers and others point out, continuing barriers to physician reporting include the lack of valid tools for physicians to use in determining medical fitness to drive."
