To find what’s happened to Michael Mosley quite anxiety provoking

Yes I agree with a happy gappy medium of what we normally have in this country, that legislation is going to change. However, unfortunately many people who are ill are disorientated/confused and wouldn’t have the sense to pull a cord before collapsing, even if they did decide to find a disabled toilet with one in. Also a door doesn’t need to be locked- a body will prevent it opening (I know from experience). The new door designs that are inward opening will have to be able to be opened from the outside and open outwardly too - so there is recognition of emergency situations.

Yes the stable door American style ones are very different from the ones you get in this country. Interestingly the ‘evidence’ for full enclosure in published UK government documents originated from an American source that had this one quote:
‘A better solution, supported by many transactivists, and increasingly found in trendy nightclubs and restaurants, is to eliminate gender-segregated facilities entirely and treat the public restroom as one single open space with fully enclosed stalls.’
That was the ‘evidence and literature’ in a government commissioned report looking at toilet design for people with long term health conditions last year - so from that all new UK designs that mention door and partition height, even for the ambulant single sex toilet (for people who are frailer) have been designed as fully enclosed. It’s a false equivalence.

It’s also why it is incredibly difficult to talk about safety because not only do people value privacy over safety, but also it becomes a political hot potato. This is also why I have tried to campaign whilst keeping somewhat anonymous because of the inconvenient truth. Also the strong evidence between assaults and fully enclosed private spaces in public areas is something I struggle with drawing attention to.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission were not interested in the fact this discriminates against medically vulnerable, women and older people because there’s no evidence. They said I had to send in reports of deaths/ injuries after the legislation with proof the enclosed design led to the death. Then they would investigate. They emailed me an incident form!

It’s obvious it’s a timebomb. There’s no point having defibrillators on the wall and toilets you can get into easily, if you don’t know the person could be dying on the floor next to you - because there’s a full height, acoustically-sound partition and door between you.

It’s depressing as it’s so bloody obvious. Early detection matters - look at any stroke or heart attack website for much time matters. You multiply up the number of lives altered, people who will collapse/ get assaulted behind the new toilet designs and will have to rely on someone else somehow guessing what is going on. Plus the assaults that could have been prevented in the first place.

It’s about prevention and safeguarding.

@VenusEnvyXX thank you for asking where you can find out more. I am wondering, since nobody in government and the press is taking me up on this, how to campaign more effectively to try and get the gaps put in the design before October. There are so many documents I have read and have analysed now. I can send hyperlinks to the main ones for anyone who wants. With the election, it’s very difficult to get anyone’s attention.

Going back to Michael Mosley and the OP, there have been incidences that make me very aware of collapses and can be more anxious. However, turn the negative anxiety into doing something positive about it. That’s what I am trying to do. Living your life to the fullest is a bit cliche but true. Learn from it, do what you can, but that is all.

this absolutely.....also proper planning prevents piss poor performance

saying that there are people who "get away with things" means that people who don't plan and risk assess will be as safe as people who do is plain silly!

MM don’t have a phone with him to take, clearly didn’t imagine he would need it, and due to his age would have been perfectly used to walking without it.
It was not due to his age that he didn't have one. He's 67, mobile phones have been around for 30 years !
He was an advocate of walking without your mobile to enjoy living in the moment. I listened to that on one's of his podcasts.

People need to take responsibility for themselves, so yes, they should be partly blamed for overeating. No one forces them to overeat. I do say partly because it’s also the government’s fault for allowing supermarkets to sell so much junk.

Yes but people aren’t risking their lives looking for them. If you (or anyone else) is walking in inhospitable or higher risk areas and are injured or lost, others have to risk life and limb to look for you.

I think whoever mentioned attitude to risk has got this one spot on. Some people are hugely risk averse, some have a gung ho attitude. MM was clearly towards the latter on a scale.
I imagine almost everyone reading this, if they were to look on at the image below, view from Pedi, looking left to those fateful mountains, wouldn't even dream of embarking on a walk in that direction in the conditions at that time.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/FfuGQo25aej78qwj8

I never said you can completely avoid risk! Shit happens. But sitting in a hot conservatory on a hot day is clearly riskier than sitting in the cooler/darker lounge!

MM don’t have a phone with him to take, clearly didn’t imagine he would need it, and due to his age would have been perfectly used to walking without it.
Furthermore no doubt if he’d rung for help when he started to feel ill the outcome would have been the same by the time anyone could have reached him.

In some ways, yes. Such as the very low risks of suffering one of the many types of cancer with no known lifestyle nor genetic reason. But, with cancer, many types ARE caused by lifestyle choices. So whilst no one can mitigate and take precautions against the former, they can certainly make lifestyle decisions to help avoid the latter.

In life, there are many risks, some avoidable, some not, some partially avoidable, some you can mitigate against, some you can plan to help avoid, some you can't. Of course, no one can mitigate against the space shuttle crashing on your house whilst you're watching Corry, but that is the extreme. There are multiple ways of reducing risk to put you in the best possible possible of not suffering a catastrophic event with planning, precautions, and ultimately it's your own choice whether to take the risk of doing something more risky than average based on your own evaluation of the consequences if things go wrong.

Trouble is, people seem very poor at evaluating risk and preparation to mitigate risks. If you fail to prepare then prepare to fail!

Given millions of women live with men the fact that two die a week actually means the risk on an individual level is very small. If millions of women went hiking by themselves in relatively dangerous territory probably a lot more than two a week would die.

Could he have been preoccupied with something, was he enjoying the walk and the breeze with his mind totally absorbed by other things, so that it almost wasn’t even a conscious decision to keep going
That's a good point. Obviously no one know if it is applicable in this case but I have definitely done this. I was wandering round Longridge fell, somewhere I know extremely well, preoccupied with a problem that was going round and round in my head. When I snapped out of my thoughts I didn't have a clue where I was. This was a place I used to three times a week for years when I lived in Lancashire. It was really disconcerting.

My dad (older than MM) got heatstroke from sitting in the conservatory in East Lancashire. Didn't die as someone else came in the house noticed and called an ambulance for him but probably would have done if he lived on his own. Sitting in a conservatory in Burnley isn't up there with most risky activity.........

I tend to think that his poor judgement leading to the decisions that proved fatal was caused by the early stages of heat stroke. The reason given for him walking back was that he felt unwell.
Noel Cowerd was correct about mad dogs and English men.

@BonifaceBonanza

He would have no reason to think before setting out that he would get lost.

Strange thing to say. No one would set out on a walk with an expectation that they'd get lost! But sensible people still take precautions, such as having a charged mobile phone, a map, proper clothing, a good water supply, etc etc.

I know the Mountain Rescue and Cave Rescue organisations (and also RNLI) despair at the number of people they have to rescue who've taken few, if any, precautions, done virtually no planning etc. None of them "expected" to get lost or fall and break a leg or sprain an ankle, or get cut off by the tide etc., but the ones who took no precautions and did little planning are the ones who end up needing to be rescued, and have an increased risk of not making it alive. The ones who take precautions can still have accidents, can still get lost, etc., but are more likely to get help quicker.

Agree, not to minimise what op is feeling but it's just something that makes us confront our own mortality and realise we have very little control over our lives and we are kidding ourselves if we think otherwise.

I dont think this particular story is all that anxiety provoking as it's most likely the heat that was the deciding factor. We will of course know more once investigations are fully complete.
In other words, had he been walking in the exact same circumstances (i.e. no phone, same route, same detour, walking alone) but in cooler conditions then it would likely have been a happier outcome, a total non event.
Clearly MM's actions last week were unusual to most people, even at face value (rather than in hindsight) as thankfully Brits abroad aren't meeting the same fate with any regularity. I think almost all of us, looking at the scenery from Pedi beach, would not embark on a walk, alone, into that incredibly barren looking mountainous area, particularly at that time of day in a heatwave. BUT MM, as his wife said, was an adventurer. I'm sure he was aware that it carried some risk, but not enough to deter him.

*MuseKira

Whether a risk is "unnecessary" or not depends on your own personal risk profile and your own lifestyle choices. But at the end of the day, you take the risks and you take the consequences

PRECISELY.
And until two female walkers a week die in walking accidents, I will continue my long solitary walks and not cohabit with a man. That's what my own personal risk profile tells me to do.

I think people can sometimes be great at caring for/being concerned about other people, but less on the ball when it comes to caring for themselves.

Presumably MM was feeling absolutely fine after the first part of his walk, so much so that he wanted to continue walking rather than get a bus.

Much is made of the heat, but I wonder how it actually felt to him at the time under the shade of his umbrella, being right next to the sea, perhaps with a nice cooling breeze?

Did he subjectively feel like it was a comfortable temperature for him, perhaps down by the water the heat just didn’t really register all that much.

Could he have been preoccupied with something, was he enjoying the walk and the breeze with his mind totally absorbed by other things, so that it almost wasn’t even a conscious decision to keep going, he just went where his feet led him.

If he started to think he’d taken the wrong route, how much farther did he go before he was absolutely sure that he wasn’t almost there.

At the point he was sure he’d gone wrong, and perhaps started to feel a pang of concern, did he think the safer option was to carry on rather than go back?

Did the cooling breeze disappear? Did he find that with the breeze gone, and the sun beating off the rocks his experience of the extreme heat came on very suddenly, and that in just a moment it went from something he was only vaguely conscious of to something far more relentless and dizzying?

I find I keep asking myself questions like this as I try to make sense of it. I suspect if you were able to ask him he’d say there was never any sense of recklessness on his part, more just an accumulation of decisions that each felt reasonable at the time, but were taken too lightly, based on how he felt at that moment on a beautiful afternoon at the beginning of a holiday, rather than thinking clearly about what might possibly go wrong.

I find myself wondering what I would have done, would I have really been that much more careful than him? Could it have been me strolling along, enjoying the sea air and the sparkle of the sun on the water thinking to myself that I’ll just keep going for a little while longer.

It seems pretty clear to me that he quite reasonably went for a walk. Had good sun protection, a bottle of water and was fit and well, maybe only intending to walk a further 30 minutes.
But he took a wrong turn, became lost, realised this, then tried to navigate to safety, making the walk much longer than intended.
Indeed of the 1hr 45 min second leg of the walk, 30 mins was spent at the end, and before this some time will have been spent trying to find his way again.
He would have no reason to think before setting out that he would get lost.
What a tragic shame

As a Mediterranean I can guarantee that none of the locals would have attempted this at any age or thought it to be vaguely sensible. That is not to say that he wouldn't have felt ill anyway, but heat stroke can have consequences at any age. Both my daughters collapsed due to the heat at different ages (12 and 16 respecitvely) and this isn't uncommon. Older people in Med countries die of heat a lot, check articles etc..and none of them are doing hill walks in the middle of the day.

indeed but it seems to throw less "curveballs" at people who plan and prepare properly.

I'm not so sure, me and my friends and I'm sure plenty more people have plenty of tales, manly from our younger days where they have done stuff and ' got away with it'.

I'm hearing stories from my now adult kids that are leaving me in shock and just thankfully thay are still alive!!🤣🤣

I'm not sure they do longterm. I think health economists worked out that smoking saves society money ultimately as people die younger, don't take pensions for as long, need care homes for as long or at all etc.

Nail on the head!

Whilst it hasn’t made me anxious, it has made me very sad and reminded me about the fragility of life. He was fit and well looked after his health yet this happened to him in one ordinary afternoon.

It also feels unfair and unjust - in a world where we have such terrible people, it seems very wrong for this to happen to a good man. He was a force for good. He will have helped thousands of people with his brilliant easy to understand advice on health and our bodies.

We must enjoy life to the full.