What are the practical implications of this?
I campaign for safe toilet rooms. It was depressing that Dr Upton’s ‘solution’ for changing rooms was similar to the one I have heard before for toilets - a gender neutral area with completely private cubicles.
Health &Safety
Dignity &Privacy
These phrases keep coming up.
If you are to design a changing room or set of toilet cubicles, which out of the 4 words is the most important?
Being SAFE of course. I would have said health comes second - you need to come out without picking up a disease.
Everyone is safer when toilet cubicles have gaps under the door. It is a reasonable adjustment to override complete privacy for everyone. It is particular an essential adjustment for the 1% of the population with epilepsy and for people with other invisible disabilities. Hypos, strokes (1 every 5 mins in the uk), heart attacks (1 every 5 mins in the uk), head injuries, spikings, fevers: all conditions where you may get nauseous and head to the loo.
Everyone is healthier when toilets have gaps under the door. It is a reasonable adjustment for everyone. Scientific research proves toilets can be cleaned better and ventilation (to prevent concentration of airborne diseases) is greater.
As soon as toilet blocks become mixed sex they are more dangerous and less healthy. The doors and partitions go down to the door. Precisely because collapsed bodies impede the inwards door opening, in such cubicles the doors have a mechanism so they can be opened easily from the outside, outwards. The doors and partitions have to adequately resist the passage of sound. These are the government’s design requirements in the recent Document T (for public toilets in workplaces and venues) for mixed sex toilets.
This impacts on everyone’s safety because there is a mixed sex public area where everyone is expected, next to a private cubicle where criminal activities can take place without being witnessed, so it favours the perpetrator. They can even let themselves in.
Rapes and sexual assaults happen every day in such spaces. When people say ‘well what about disabled loos and on trains?’ - yes, look at newspaper reports at where they are taking place. In schools it was noted in past reports to be the broom cupboard. Same principle. We do not need more of these private spaces in public mixed sex areas. Assaults in hospitals and schools are endemic and it is fuelled by having cubicles of privacy.
The safest and healthiest solution is the same designs that have worked across much of the world for years. Because the priorities were health and safety. Single sex toilet blocks with cubicles having door gaps, particularly the one from the floor to bottom of the door. This is so you can prevent cubicles being a place of criminal activity or a place someone dies/ suffers long term damage. Gaps can also help quick rescue times in the event of a building evacuation. They can be cleaned easily.
There was lots of consultation for toilet cubicles in Document T. The government commissioned a private firm (ARUP) to look at the requirements of people with disabilities and long term health conditions to inform future policy and guidance. In the whole 171-page document there was no mention of the words: seizure, faint, diabetes, cardiac, heart, epilepsy, syncope, endometriosis, menorrhagia, collapse. There was one mention of ‘stroke’ in reference to a grab rail. In the report the article references to periods are only in relation to transgender people.
They recommended full height cubicles and the evidence was based on this quote from two Americans who design for trans inclusiveness, ‘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.’
Those American designers still (as of April 2024) hadn’t actually done any health and safety tests on their designs.
Whats the point in having defibrillators in public places then making the place where people go when they are feeling ill completely private? Oxygen is needed for the brain to make use of glucose, its major energy source. If the oxygen supply is interrupted, consciousness will be lost within 15 seconds and damage to the brain begins to occur after about four minutes without oxygen.
There is a defibrillator in every secondary school because they save lives if used in time. Yet you need to be able to see if someone has collapsed. In the last few years the DfE have reduced the floor to door gaps from 150mm to 5mm on all toilet cubicle doors. In addition have also introduced the term gender neutral and their designs now stipulate a gender neutral toilet on each floor (separate from accessible/disabled). Safety isn’t mentioned once in the DfE building design document section on toilets. Privacy is mentioned multiple times. When I questioned the decrease in safety, the DfE said the designs were for privacy and if schools follow their stipulated designs, the responsibility for pupil safety and safeguarding ultimately still falls on the school and governors so it is up to the schools themselves to decide what is best for their cohort.
Doors gaps do save lives. I know because I saved a young woman in a nightclub once because I saw her blue hand sticking out the ladies toilet cubicle door gap. I live with not saving another young person from being permanently injured, even though they were only a few feet away, because I didn’t realise they had collapsed behind a full height door. So many people have told me their stories too.
In terms of how toilet design got here, to the point where toilet cubicles are much less safer for everyone than they used to be, you can see it’s because people are forgetting/overriding safety and health. Everyone is concentrating on the effect of not being able to control toilets being mixed sex so the knee-jerk solution is privacy. But it’s too heavy a price to pay for the loss of safety, affecting those with the protected characteristics of disability, age and sex (particularly girls and women) the most.
Btw if anyone wants medical/ scientific/ government document references and evidence to any of above I am pleased to supply it. I have lots more than discussed here as I have tried (!) to keep this short.
From my research on toilet area design, I think a single sex communal changing area with single sex toilets off (with gaps at least at the bottom of the toilet cubicle doors) is the safest and healthiest option. Why would you want any other design? It’s certainly not for better health and safety.