How to help a driver in need

Sean Farrell has driven for CLEAN Linen & Workwear for more than a decade. A trusted presence at their Camberley depot, Sean provides coaching and assessment to help other drivers perform at their best. By any measure his employer could see, he was doing fine. But that wasn’t the whole picture.

In the solitude of the cab, invisible to his colleagues, Sean was dealing with his own mental health struggles. But while it may not have always felt like it during those long hours on the road, he wasn’t alone.

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Mental health is a major problem for professional drivers

Drivers will tell you this when asked directly. When the Trucking Lives project surveyed 1,980 current and former HGV drivers in 2023, 54% of current drivers said the job had harmed their physical health and 32% said it had harmed their mental health. More than half had considered quitting in the previous 12 months. 

The conditions behind these grim findings are no secret: long hours alone, nights away, unpredictable schedules, and patchy access to somewhere decent to eat, wash, or stop for a rest. A third of those surveyed also had caring responsibilities waiting at home.

But while the occupational downsides of haulage have been clear for many years, their consequences are devastating. The most recent ONS analysis of suicide by occupation, covering deaths registered in England between 2011 and 2015 among people aged 20 to 64, found that the estimated risk among male drivers was 20% above the national average for large goods vehicles, 25% higher for vans, and 85% higher for fork lift truck drivers. Those figures are now more than a decade old, but the problem lingers. 

When mental health collides with modern safety systems

Driving is a tough job, and drivers need support from their employers. Yet tensions can arise when managers start to implement modern fleet safety technology like in-cab dash cams. These tools can detect risky incidents like drowsiness, distractedness, mobile usage and speeding, and send alerts to drivers and managers. They can also spot emerging patterns that busy managers might miss. But they can’t tell you anything about the real reasons why a driver might nod off at the wheel on a Tuesday afternoon.   

Whether it’s a new baby, sleep apnoea, grief, a medical diagnosis or just a bad night’s sleep, the real reason will never show up in the event log, but it will be crucial in determining the right response. The task is to get through to a driver and make them feel safe enough to share what they’re going through, so you can both work on a plan to help resolve or accommodate it. 

The problem is that drivers often view the introduction of safety technology with suspicion. The term “Big Brother” is not uncommon in the early stages of a rollout. If drivers don’t trust the tools designed to help them, they’ll be resistant to any conversations based around the patterns they’ve surfaced. 

Nothing is more important in this scenario than building a culture of trust, steered by people that drivers recognise.       

Harnessing the power of peers 

 Wellbeing efforts may be less effective if they’re led solely by a remote managerial layer. People may be more likely to open up in front of those they regard as peers, and CLEAN’s managers realised they were the wrong people to carry out sensitive conversations. Instead, they nominated Sean on account of his long experience as an HGV driver. 

"Before, it was very much management down to the drivers. We needed to have someone in the middle who had probably been a driver, or could coach the drivers, because they experience the day-to-day problems that drivers do experience."

Manager, CLEAN Linen & Workwear

Sean reviews the driver data, coaches on it, but he’s not there to discipline anyone. Instead, he provides an empathetic ear, and a perspective anchored in years spent doing what drivers do, and enduring what they endure. Sean can, in his own words, “speak to them in a way they’d like to be spoken to”. 

This is a crucial process, but it’s not typically a quick one. Sean recounts a particular time when it took hours to break through to a driver in need. 

"I had [a session with ] a driver…the first two or three hours were just so uncomfortable. And then he started talking to me. I went into my mental health and what I've lost, and he went into something and told me what had happened to him in his past. His whole attitude changed."

- Sean Farrell, CLEAN Linen & Workwear

These moments of connection can be hard to anticipate beforehand, and volatile in the moment. Making drivers feel like they’re on the clock will defeat the purpose. 

Peer-led check-ins are a powerful tactic, but these conversations shouldn’t feel like islands of understanding in an otherwise uncaring environment. Empathy is a practice, not a one-and-done action. As another CLEAN team member said, he cannot remember a single day when a team leader failed to ask how he was. Those small demonstrations of care, repeated daily, cost nothing. But they can make a lot of difference. 

Closing the support gap without waiting for a crisis

Drivers are asking for more attention from their employers. In research Samsara commissioned in September 2025, covering 500 UK drivers, 78% said they wanted more frequent health checks and 79% wanted more investment in coaching and training.

But the kind of interventions that would actually help them are more contested. The Trucking Lives survey found that part-time working hour arrangements were available to 14% of HGV drivers and used by only 4%, with annualised hours or term-time arrangements even less used. There is no one-size-fits-all playbook. Some fleets may offer allowances that would be operationally impossible for others. Similarly, giving drivers extra flexibility may seem easier said than done in the context of an ongoing labour shortage.

Equally, some tried-and-tested wellbeing go-tos may not even translate into this working context. After all, a driver on a shift cannot easily reach the formal support programmes available to many office workers. 

The specifics will only become apparent after you’ve used safety data to see which drivers might be in need of a check-in. What you find out will be hard to hear in some cases, but it’s crucial to listen to it, and to act on it. In the meantime, the following tactics can help support your drivers’ wellbeing, whatever your conversations uncover.  

• Give the first conversation to someone with no disciplinary power. A peer coach, a driver trainer, somebody who has run the same routes.

• Make the daily question routine rather than an initiative. Regularly asking how someone is, every shift, can be more meaningful than an annual wellbeing campaign.

• Fund the formal backstop as well as the informal one. CLEAN runs mental health first aiders, an Employee Assistance Programme, and an open-door policy alongside the peer coaching, because they know full well that personal problems affect how people drive.

• Decide what the first responder can offer without escalating. A rest break, a route or shift change, an occupational health referral, paid time off. A conversation that routinely ends in "I'll see what I can do" may discourage drivers from seeking support.

• Spend time explaining the benefits of safety technology in terms that benefit drivers. Drivers dealing with personal problems may see in-cab devices as an intrusion that may only add to their stress levels. It’s vital that any deployment is accompanied by communications framed around why this technology helps drivers, rather than the company.     

• Name who sees an incident alert, and who responds. At Vp Brandon Hire Station, Road Risk Manager Susan Moore is the first to see every crash alert. When General Manager Gary Penberthy was hit by a driver who failed to stop at a junction in Plymouth, she saw it from head office and got a colleague to him before paramedics arrived.

• Write the pathway down. At CLEAN, two dedicated staff triage every event so evaluation stays consistent across all seven sites, then assign coaches with set timeframes. This stops wellbeing protocols getting lost in staff churn. 

Installing safety technology is a crucial part of a broader approach to protecting your drivers’ wellbeing, but it’s only ever the start of the process. No machine can replicate the tact and empathy that convinces reticent drivers to share what they might be carrying with them into the cab, so that you can take some of the load. 

If your team has found a way of approaching driver wellbeing, Samsara would like to hear how you help your drivers in need. Get in touch. 

If you or someone you work with is struggling, Samaritans are available day or night on 116 123.

Mates in Mind provides mental-health resources, training and support for organisations and workers in the transport, logistics and construction sectors

Shout, the UK’s only free confidential text crisis service, provides anonymous 24/7 support at 85258.