Abstract
The Model Development Of Safety Promotion In the School Buses at Chiang Rai Province The purpose of this participatory action research was to develop the model to find out the suitable strategy to develop the safety promotion system for the school buses in Chiang Rai province by the process of actively participation from all related sectors in Chiang Rai included :- the Police Units, Transportation Offices, schools/colleges, Public Health Offices, Mass media offices, and Chiang Rai School bus Club. The study population were 388 school bus drivers who were the members of the Chiang Rai school bus club. The study period took one and a half year long from March 2001 to August 2002. It was divided into 2 phases. In the first phase, 213 school bus drivers were random sampling for interviewing by questionnaire to identify the important problems related to the safety of the school bus. The focus group discussion with the key members of the school bus Club were conducted to provide the qualitative data related to the same problems. Surveillance for the risk behavior, brain storming and setting up the action plan were developed. In the second phase, all school bus drivers were invited to participate in the action plan for promoting the safety condition in the school bus transportation such as training program on safety driving, checking up and improving the school bus condition to meet the standard requirement, educational media production, driving behavior surveillance, campaigning a good behavior driving competition, etc. The study tools included : structure questionnaires, guideline for focus group discussion, behavior observation of drivers, accident report of schools, hospitals, and the school bus club. The percentage, mean and standard deviation were used as the descriptive statistics for data analysis. The results of this study in Phase one showed that 87.7 % of the school bus drivers were male, 51.1% had completed a primary education level, 11.7% had a history of smoking, 8.0% had a history of alcohol drinking, 42.7% had a regular physical check up, 52.1% put on seat belt during driving, 90.1% of the school bus was a van-type, and 93.0% owned the school bus. By average, the cars were used for 9 years, the experience in driving a car was 14.7 years and driving a school bus was 6.2 years. One school bus carried the students around 4.9 schools per car. One year before this project started, there were 16 vehicles (7.5%) got the traffic accidents. A number of activities were introduced to solve the problems. A training course for all school bus drivers was organized. The 16 standard conditions for the school bus were applied to check all 257 school buses and 39.7% of them could not pass in the first round but after improving the vehicle conditions within one month, all school bus were met the requirement. All school bus drivers received the health examination from health personnel. The results showed that 6 drivers (0.3%) had hypertension and all of them had gingivitis. Urine test for amphetamine was done for 301 drivers. Twelve (3.9%) of them found positive by the screening test. Confirmatory test was rechecked and only 1 (0.3%) urine specimen provided positive result for amphetamine. The system development for safety promotion of school buses was quite success by the collaboration of public and private sectors in Chiang Rai. Many things had much improved such as better driving behavior follow the traffic regulations, improving the school bus condition, taking care of their health, development of injury surveillance system, driving behavior observation, referral system for emergency and accident, and educational campaign for traffic safety promotion through public medias. During the study period, 3 school buses had accident [0.8%], 10 students were injured, and nobody died. These number of accidents was much less when compared with the previous year. This new approach model which actively participate by all sectors had showed the great impact for preventing the accident caused by the school buses. The lesson learn from this study should be used as a prototype for other provinces to modify for solving their own problems.
