Entire towns are falling off their ladders
It’s Safety New Zealand Week. This morning I was reading in the Dominion Post of a renewed campaign to alert us to dangers at home. Apparently last year more than 650,000 of us were injured in the home – one every 48 seconds. Staggering!
This afternoon ACC kicked off its campaign with a statement detailing more grim statistics. These include more than 17,000 accidents in bathrooms each year, 87 stair-related accidents every day, and 133 injuries per week to children from running through glass or falling from windows.
Last year we paid out $622 million through our ACC levies for the treatment and rehabilitation of people injured in the home. (I love the way ACC refers to “New Zealanders” and “their” levies, as if they are from another country.)
We’re obviously a careless bunch because in the past 12 months 5,400 people were injured using a ladder at home – that’s 15 people every day. Never mind that this equates to a significantly-sized town of ladder victims alone.
Having Safety Week has to be a good thing, but I would like to know how we fare in relation to other OECD countries. I suspect these figures are not apparent because others don’t have such generous systems as our ACC, and they simply have to fork out for their own carelessness. Or it is just the male can-do attitude that gets us into trouble around the home and up ladders.
I’ve seen lot of ACC television adverts over the years – people tripping over toys and the like – and sometimes I wonder whether we’ve become too self reliant on others doing our thinking for us. Perhaps this is why we are so accident prone.
Now I’ve not been above carelessness myself over the years, with a busted elbow and compound fracture of the arm. Discreetly I did this outside the home.
Perhaps one answer is to have a home-accident prosecution system akin to the workplace one.
Other possible solutions are living away from home, having only single storey dwellings without roofs, licensing the use of ladders, or hiring an expert, which would make many of these incidents workplace claims. Just a thought.
Tags: ACC, advertising, Dominion Post, levies, Safety, Safety New Zealand Week
August 30th, 2010 at 7:32 pm
One aspects of the many different statistics that suggest we really are a very careless and clumsy country does not I think take into account the unique nature of how we live in NZ. I am thinking when children get run over in driveways and most recently there was some statistics related to car accidents and boy racers. It possibly also relates to ladder falls.
For children in driveways the ratio of driveways to head of population probably quite high – not that even one child being hit is acceptable For boy racers we have open roads and streets that make it easier and more appealing for these “kids” to drive their cars around. In big highly populated cities parking costs would be significant and most gangs when they appear in tv look to have one car to one gang. So while the ladder statistics are not good and should be a whole lot better international comparisons are not necessarily helpful. Maybe the threat of libel suits would be a stronger incentive to be careful? Jane Dodd