Firstly I hope his family will be taking comfort in the outpouring of lovely stories that I have seen in the media.
But a few statistics in the following post so thought I should warn. Also- it’s long!
If you collapse, being able to survive or if you suffer long-term damage, will be down to whether someone notices and rescues you.
I am campaigning for gaps to be kept between the floor and the bottom of the toilet doors. Small design detail that saves lots of lives when you need it.
None of the government’s new toilet designs (in every non domestic building and refurbishments) from October specify door gaps. They specify every door should be able to be opened from the outside in an emergency but there is no point if you can’t see the person, so don’t know if they have collapsed. They also specify acoustic deadening.
If you’re out and about or at work and feel nauseous/ill you are likely to head to the toilet.
There are around 100,000 hospital admissions due to heart attacks in this country, equating to one every five minutes.
There are also around 100,000 strokes in this country, equating to one every five minutes. There are known medical reasons for a disproportionally high frequency of cardiac arrests and strokes while an individual is in the toilet because of the physiological strain on the body.
Around 1% of people in this country have epilepsy and around 80 people are diagnosed with epilepsy each day. To put it into perspective there are around 9 children with epilepsy in an average secondary school.
There are many other conditions that lead to collapse where you need to be noticed and accessed quickly eg. diabetes.
A recent government report noted 80% of the thousands of incidents of drink spiking happen in public places, usually in bars and clubs, mainly to women, average age 26.
Prevention of sexual assaults is also key.
In any space that becomes private, more offences are likely to take place. In Parliament it was discussed that there was at least 1 rape inside a school premises each day (over 600 in a 3 year period). The data, collected by the BBC, mentions an example occurring in a private cupboard. This was in 2015, before many schools decided to change their toilet designs to fully enclosed and mixed sex. There is no available data on these new toilet designs but, teachers and pupils are reporting many problems with drug dealing, dirt and sex. The toilet door gaps are vital for safeguarding to help prevent activities that stop pupils, especially girls, going to the toilet. There are known problems of girls avoiding toilets and getting urinary infections or missing school. This legislation does not affect schools but they have been at the ‘coalface’ of new experimental toilet designs so it a good demonstration of what goes wrong.
A quick internet search brings up the disproportionate number of sexual assaults and rapes that happen to able bodied and disabled women and girls in disabled toilets in this country which are obviously mixed sex and fully enclosed toilets, often in very public places such as busy train stations and shopping centres.
More problems with toilets with enclosed full height doors are:
- Ventilation is decreased so there’s a higher risk of disease spread.
- Evacuation times are greatly increased as a responder can’t tell quickly if stalls are occupied.
- Hygiene is compromised as a mop can’t go underneath the doors nor floor be washed down. It is awkward to enter the cubicle with a mop and detritus ends up on the partition corners.
- Doors are more likely to get stuck/warped and the cubicle out of action.
- People are more likely to engage in illegal activities (drugs) or self harm if they are in a private space.
- The length of time in a cubicle is increased, especially if the wash basin is in there so queues are longer.
- Occupants can’t see if anyone is lying in wait outside their cubicle if they are feeling vulnerable.
Why have toilet cubicle door gaps disappeared from the new public toilet designs?
There are many articles and videos on why we have gaps under and over toilet doors - so it is worrying these have been ignored. The initial government consultation that was publicised several years ago led to Stonewall coordinating a response and very effectively dominating the results. There is nothing wrong with this as such but the policy goals that were created from the initial consultation concentrated on mixed sex ‘universal’ toilets and privacy because of toilets being mixed sex. The concepts of mixed sex toilets have then been applied to the single sex designs without anyone joining the dots as to why the gaps are there.
Apologies for the long post but one of the reasons I am so passionate about this is I did save a young girl who had collapsed, by noticing she had because of a toilet door gap. She was in very public block of toilets and had already collapsed and was silent. I helped get her breathing properly again.
Unfortunately no politician has got back to me when I have tried to raise this, hence me raising this here. I have sent a lot of research to lots of people. No journalist has ran with it.
It’s something I hope will get into people’s minds who have any kind of influence. So I hope people won’t mind me adding this post to a thread about a very inspirational man but he made a point about getting messages out. So I am trying to do that as much as possible.
Mind the gap - it saves lives.