Serious stair injuries can be prevented by improved stair design
Introduction
In the UK, every year there are an estimated 2.5 million home accidents serious enough to cause the victim to attend a hospital Accident and Emergency (A&E) unit (Consumer Safety Unit DTI, 1997). There are a further 4000 deaths resulting from home accidents. An estimated 230,000 of these accidents and nearly 500 of the fatalities were the result of falls on stairs. Taking into account the amount of time people spend on stairs, this makes stairs the most dangerous component of any home. This paper considers the seriousness of one particular stair accident scenario and what could be done to reduce the number of accidents that might occur as a result of this hazard.
Section snippets
Types of stair accident
There are at least three major reasons for stair accidents: user behaviour, maintenance and design. User behaviour accidents might include: tripping over objects placed on steps (roller skates or the cat, for example), running up or down the stairs, missing steps or taking two or three steps at a time. They could even include playing or fighting on stairs or just being distracted by some other event causing that momentary lack of attention. Such accidents are difficult to control and hence will
Stair terminology and geometry
Stair geometry can be described by the terms “rise”, “going” and “pitch”, (see Fig. 1.) The rise, the vertical distance between two consecutive treads or between a tread and a landing, is easily determined from the floor-to-floor height where the stair is to be situated. Since it is good design to have equally sized steps the floor-to-floor height should be an exact multiple of the rise. For example with a floor-to-floor height of 2.6 m, typical in British dwellings, the rise could be 260, 236,
The stair gait
People walk up and down stairs in a manner that is very different to walking on the level; a full description of the normal stair gait is given by Templer (1992) and is summarised as follows. In descent, where the accidents tend to be more serious, the leading foot swings over two nosings (of the tread the leading foot was on and the tread the rear foot is now on) and stops over the tread below; this is known as the swing phase. As this leading foot starts its descent the heel of the rear foot
Hazards associated with the stair gait
On ascent, the accidents tend to be less severe in nature (Templer, 1992). This is because the centre of gravity of the user is slightly forward, so that most falls are relatively small and towards the higher steps. The greatest risks, when considering the gait, are during the swing phase. As the rear foot passes over two nosings, there is a high risk of tripping; this is particularly heightened if there is a large variation in rise values along the flight. Another risk situation in ascent is
Can these injuries be prevented?
These accidents, and hence the injuries that result from them, are to a large extent preventable by making the stair goings larger than the feet of the users. Where the stairs are unfamiliar to the users, and when crowds might be using the stair at the same time, this safety measure is already applied. Under the present guidance (Department of the Environment and the Welsh Office, 1992; British Standards Institute, 1984) the going in these situations should be a minimum of 280 mm. This compares
The costs and the benefits
What will it cost builders to install these larger stairs? The maximum possible cost to the domestic property builder would be a loss of floor area of approximately 0.6 m2 for a 900 mm wide stair, i.e., 0.3 m2 downstairs and a 0.3 m2 hole upstairs. Some of this lost floor area could, however, be recovered elsewhere, for example, with increased under stair storage, or adequate space for a downstairs WC. Rearrangement of the internal space could therefore make these changes negligible, or even
References (6)
- British Standards Institute, 1984. BS5395: Part 1: 1977: Stairs, Ladders and Walkways: Code for the Design of Straight...
- Consumer Safety Unit, DTI, 1997. Home Accident Surveillance System 1995: 19th Annual Report. Department of Trade and...
- Department of the Environment and The Welsh Office, 1992. The Building Regulations 1991 Approved Document K: Stairs,...
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