You may not think it, but the bathroom is one of the most dangerous rooms in the house. Every year, there are 200,000 bathroom related accidents such as slips, falls, and scaldings. Most of those accidents could be easily avoided. Here are a few tips to help you make your bathroom as safe as possible.
Fit Grip Bars
It’s easy to slip on a wet bathroom floor. Fit sturdy, well anchored horizontal bars near the bath or shower, and the toilet. Don’t rely on standard towel bars, or diagonally placed bars, for grip. Most towel holders are not designed to take the weight of someone leaning on them, and diagonal grip bars are a recipe for an injured arm as well as a fall.
Replace Your Bath Mat Regularly
If you use rubber bath mats, rather than bathtubs that are designed with grips already in them, then you should replace the mat frequently. As they decay, they lose suction power, and become smooth on top. A loose mat is more dangerous than no mat at all.
Resurface your bath
If you slip and fall inside a bath that is chipped or damaged, you could end up with a serious cut as well as a hard landing. Resurface your bath if it is showing any signs of wear and tear.
Check Your Taps
If your taps are difficult to turn, then they could pose a problem for people who have a weak grip. This can be an issue in homes with more than one person – if someone turns on the hot water, and finds it hotter than they can cope with, then they should be able to shut it off with ease. Consider investing in lever-style taps for the shower, rather than rounded ones.
Change Your Shower Door
For safety, shower doors should shut fairly securely (so that if someone rests a hand on them for balance, they won’t fall), and should open outwards, enabling people to get in if they need to aid someone who has fallen ill inside the shower.
If yours open inwards, consider what you would do in an emergency. The chances of someone fainting in the shower might seem rather slim, but if it does happen, do you want to be wasting precious time trying to prize the door off the shower?
Keep the Room Clean
Chips and cracks are a breeding ground for bacteria, so when you resurface your bath, consider also spending some time to carry out any necessary repairs on the shower, sink, and other parts of the bathroom. Keep the room clean, and the floor as dry as possible.
If you have several people living in the house, make sure that people put away their bathroom products when they’re done. Leaving razors, hair removal products, medicines, and other products out in plain view can be dangerous. Imagine if someone half-asleep accidentally put depilatory cream on their toothbrush instead of toothpaste? Such mistakes happen more often than you might think!
Crispin Jones wrote this article on behalf of Hometech, experts in repairing showers who are also able to resurface your bath.
