I have never needed a car seatbelt so why should anyone bother with that? Health and Safety is there for a reason.
Whilst there’s no accessible data where people collapse, it is known there are around 100,000 hospital admissions due to heart attacks in this country, equating to one every five minutes. It is estimated there are 400,000 people in the U.K. with undiagnosed heart failure. There are also around 100,000 strokes in this country, equating to one every five minutes. Around 1% of people in this country have epilepsy and around 80 people are diagnosed with epilepsy each day. There are many other conditions that lead to collapse where you need to be noticed and accessed quickly eg. diabetes and asthma.
My research and experience disagrees with ‘fairly minimal’. The reasons people collapse in toilets more than you may realise is that that’s where people rush to when they feel ill. Nausea, vomiting or feeling like you are about to defecate can be a warning sign of something else. Then there’s the process of elimination. Holding your breath and pushing is not good for several medical conditions. Researchers find that up to 11% of cardiac arrests happen on the toilet and they have a much lesser chance of surviving because no one realises. People who are choking in a restaurant rush to the toilet out of embarrassment. People feel sick and disorientated when their sugar levels are wrong.
Then there’s the people that go into the toilet to misuse it. Such as for drug use (including vaping in schools which is a problem with spiking). Bath university have done a study on vaping and spiking - teachers have done cpr on lots of children but luckily on the playground not in a private toilet. Another typical story is when women have been spiked in bars they feel ill, head to the toilet and collapse.
In fact, all building regs for non domestic dwellings state that you need to be able to open the doors of toilets from the outside precisely in case someone collapses. You’ll find that in many regs it also says you need to be able to reverse the door swing (or take it off easily) so that a collapsed body (typically) pushing against the door can be removed.
You could just as easily collapse on the loo at home and, if you lived alone or even if your partner was just out for the day, no-one would find you in time.
Yes you could and it happens all the time. It’s where paramedics head to when the fire brigade break in. My friend’s wife found him in the bathroom when she came back from shopping and he’d had a stroke.
What is awful is that a huge number of these deaths were preventable. Between 2020-2022 seven health care professionals died in hospital toilets of drug overdoses. That number will be much less than the true number including patients having cardiac arrests, drug overdoses or self harming. You could be in the busiest ward with defibrillators and doctors a few feet away, but if the toilet door is full height and sound resistant you might as well be on a desert island.
The completely private design is attractive to misusers for drugs but also sex. Perpetrators have used very public, very busy areas to assault someone within a toilet cubicle and no one knew. Unisex design is private.
I agree with you that it shouldn’t form part of anyone’s day to day thought process but I know for carers of those with medical conditions listed above and for those with assault trauma, it unfortunately does. For those looking at health and safety it’s useful for you because it means design can help when anyone is at their most vulnerable.