Nurse, Meet Driver
Three of my four sisters are RNs. More importantly, if a certain RN (my mom) didn't make nice with a certain commercial driver (my Dad) about 50 years ago, I wouldn't even be here. So you might say I have it bad for nurses. And with all those nurses running around my life, you'd think I'd be a health nut. But you'd be wrong. The only health-and-fitness book I've ever read was called "Stay Fit and Healthy Until You're Dead," by Dave Barry. He offered advice such as "the best time to start exercising is right after Easter, but not the one coming up." I used to think that the best sport to play is darts because you could play it in a bar. I'm more health conscious than I used to be, but that's not the point. The point is, I'm a pushover for nurses. Especially when they meet drivers. So when a woman named Diane Betts told me a few months back about a bunch of Humber College-University of New Brunswick Nursing Students getting involved with a crew of drivers from Thomson Terminals in Toronto, I thought "tell me more!" Nurse Betts along with seven of her third-year students offered Thomson drivers a chance to do a health checkup, get lectured a bit if it meant feeling better, and the drivers loved it. Go figure. After the nursing students studied the truck-driver lifestyle and their health habits for three months, they took their findings, their stethoscopes and those things they use to check blood pressure over to Thomson HQ, and put on a special one-day driver-health program. At the workshop, the students talked about driver health and why it's important to be active and eat well. They took blood-pressure measurements and then offered health counseling to the truckers. The drivers, Thomson's safety guy Tom Mead said, ate it up. He was amazed at the turnout. So was I. You'd have to be a recent immigrant from another galaxy not to know that the long-distance lifestyle has been linked to things like obesity, high blood pressure, fatigue, and ailments resulting from living with constantly high levels of stress. Pick any ailment going that can be linked to sedentary lifestyle, bad food and age, and you can apply it to truckers. So the health problems don't come as a surprise. What surprises me is when I find out guys and women who you might not think care about stuff like this, care about stuff like this. My pal Duff and I got even more proof last month when we visited the APPS Transport Group's splashy 160,000-sq-ft headquarters in Brampton, Ont. APPS is one of those new-age truck outfits you're always reading about that have things like innovative employee-rewards programs, low driver turnover, and a happy staff. Definitely, one of the highlights of the tour was the company's on-site gym, with dumbbells, spinning cycles, and some other fitness doodads I don't recognize. And it's well used. In addition to drivers, dispatchers, sales reps, and technicians, APPS actually employs a fitness trainer/former body-builder named John Siembida, whose sole job is to encourage APPS' people to take better care of themselves. Siembida offers two private half-hour sessions each week to employees, and so many staffers have signed on that Siembida's shifts have gone from three days a week to five. Like the drivers at Thomson, APPS' folks crave the chance to be fit. When my (late) brother Pat drove truck in Southern Ontario, he lived on a steady diet of Player's Filter cigarettes, regular coffee from Styrofoam cups and, well, that was pretty much it. He died too young. Not to make too much of it, but sometimes I wish that the guys he drove for had a bit of Thomson, Humber or APPS DNA in them, and encouraged their drivers to take better care of themselves. Pat would have gotten a kick out of reading his brother's trucker stories.