Yes my home bathroom is like everyone else’s. I don’t talk much about home toilets because I want to raise awareness of the limiting factor for health and safety in non domestic toilets - to reduce preventable harm.
One easy thing you can do in home toilets is to make sure the lock you have can open the door from the outside. You are more likely to be able to get to a collapsed person in a home bathroom as the space is usually bigger.
Remember lots of public places (including all secondary schools) have a defibrillator. Designs can also open doors from the outside in case someone collapses against the door. You have all the components to help someone except knowing they have collapsed in the first place.
For obvious reasons, the following may be upsetting so bit of a trigger warning for a few of you who have discussed toilet incidents with me in the past.
A few days ago I was reading a story about a Radio 1 DJ who was ill, went to the bathroom, fell unconscious and hit her head. She was saying thank goodness her husband was there at the time. When it’s on your radar, you realise how many people have a toilet story.
After I started researching, a family friend felt ill, went to the bathroom and had a stroke but his wife was out. She found him much later unconscious when she came back. As everyone is aware, you need to act fast with strokes and our friend has died.
An Japanese academic study showed the frequency of return of spontaneous circulation was highest in those who collapsed in the presence of caregivers and lowest in those whose collapse were discovered later by family members being worried that the patient stayed in the toilet “too long.” The rarity of long-term survival among individuals sustaining cardiac arrest in the toilet is mainly due to the delay in discovering the individual who collapsed. The results were 70% in the presence of a caregiver, 55% if the caregiver heard them collapse and 30% if they were wondering why they were spending too long on the toilet.
Whilst there’s no accessible data to show the exact location where people in the UK collapse, the British Heart Foundation states that cardiovascular disease causes over a quarter of all deaths in the UK, or around 170,000 deaths each year – an average of 460 deaths each day or one every three minutes in the UK. There are more than 8 million people living with a cardiovascular disease in the UK. It's the single biggest premature killer (before the age of 75) in the UK. In the UK there are around 100,000 hospital admissions each year due to heart attacks: that's one every five minutes. Around 1.4 million people alive in the UK today have survived a heart attack. More than a million people in the UK today have heart failure.
There are more than 40,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests in the UK each year, with a survival rate of less than 1 in 10.
Strokes cause around 34,000 deaths in the UK each year and are the biggest cause of severe disability in the UK.
Another Japanese academic study from 2017, concluded the toilet is a closed space where stroke occurs disproportionately frequently. They stated less than 40% of patients could call for help by themselves, and recommended efforts to reduce the incidence of toilet-related strokes is warranted, as early patient detection is not always feasible.
In many situations in a non-domestic environment, no one is clock watching you on the toilet or aware of which toilet you went into.
When Dr Michael Moseley died, there was a story about how he was at the BBC, and a young woman had collapsed in the corridor. He saved her life. No one would have seen her in one of the BBCs ‘gender neutral’ toilets.
There are several reasons more toilets open to the public are being enclosed. Men’s voyeurism and encouraging a mixed sex environment play a big part in what is ironically called ‘inclusive’ design.
Enclosing non-domestic toilets is not good for health and safety. We need to keep the numbers as low as possible. Design, regulation and legislation wise, that means keeping the numbers of toilets in a mixed sex environment as low as possible.