Common wisdom says there is no safer retreat than the home. There are many reasons why your home seems safe. Not least because you are intimately familiar with the environment. However, accidents can happen anywhere, even at home, and they can range from the trivial to the life-threatening.
According to UK safety charity ROSPA, around 6,000 people a year die as a result of home accidents, with the cost to UK society of these accidents valued at over £45 billion annually.
To assess the scale of risk, PlumbNation carried out a survey to see which rooms in the house see the most accidents and which injuries occur.
It surveyed 2,000 UK adults to see which rooms in the house see the most accidents and which injuries occur the most frequently, to reveal the most “dangerous” household rooms.
In total, just under a quarter (23 percent) of people said that they had experienced an accident at home in the last year, with women slightly more likely to have had an accident than men (25 percent compared to 22 percent), but which rooms pose the biggest danger?
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Also, if there are young children around, they could get scalded, it notes.
“Keep knives sharp and in good condition and out of reach of children.”
It also recommends:
- Keeping panhandles turned inward so that children cannot reach them and pull them over
- Using a cordless kettle or one with a coiled lead so that children cannot pull on them.
What other areas of the house ranked high on the list?
Just over one in ten people said that the garden was where the most accidents occurred in their homes and a large number of these occur to children.
Respondents from Northern Ireland were the most likely to have injured themselves at home, with 46.2 percent of people saying that they had had at least one accident, which is more than twice as many as in Wales (22.2 percent).
This was closely followed by homeowners in the East Midlands (44.1 percent), with a third of people in London having had an accident at home.
The East Midlands was also the region that reported having the highest number of accidents at home in a year, with 8.8 percent saying they had had five or more.
On the other hand, over three-quarters of people in Wales said that they hadn’t had any accidents at home in the last year.