Accidents in the home / report of the Standing Interdepartmental Committee on Accidents in the Home.

  • Great Britain. Standing Interdepartmental Committee on Accidents in the Home
Date:
1953
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Accidents in the home / report of the Standing Interdepartmental Committee on Accidents in the Home. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    - SEE of FP TOT RE ee » a WEL LCON NS | rHUTt & ia } “hy 6 SRA Y } oe tae L — _ ACCIDENTS IN THE HOME nae X70; Report of the Standing (% 22 Jnterdepartmental Committee on or be | Accidents in the Home er ‘ ; i a7 » f- . 4 Se eee: oi A RAE FORE IA IPN , 1 f i ; i | —e + i ii =—T. In 1947 the Standing Interdepartmental Committee on Accidents in the Home was set up by the Home Secretary “‘to co-ordinate departmental action in con- nexion with the prevention of accidents in the home, and to maintain contact with unofficial organizations interested in the subject ”’. 2. During the past five years the Committee has been able to gather together much information about the nature, extent, causes and cost of home accidents which has not previously been available in a convenient form. This information has been of great value to the Committee, both in providing a general picture of the scope of the problem, and in focusing attention on particular hazards. It also confirms the view which the Committee formed at an early stage of their work that the two most important causes of accidents in the home are faulty design and equipment and, in the broadest sense, human frailty; and that of the two, it is the human element—ignorance, carelessness and physical disability— that is the more important. 3. In tackling the problem of how to prevent home accidents, the Committee has sought to attack these two main causes by encouraging the introduction of safer designs for household equipment and by finding ways of helping people tc understand and to accept the importance of safety precautions in the home. It is to this second object that this Report is directed, and it is hoped that the information which it contains will be of particular value as material for publicity for all the many organizations whom the Committee has found to be interested in the prevention of home accidents. The size of the problem 4, During the 10 years from 1940 to 1949 over 60, 000 people died from accidents in their homes compared with about 48,000 deaths on the roads—in fact since 1943 there have been well over 1,000 more fatal casualties each year in the home ~ than on the roads. (See Appendix A.) 5. The majority of the victims are young children and old people: more than 25 per cent. being under 15 and more than 50 per cent. over 65. More children under 15 die from home accidents than from any single infectious disease: between the ages of one and five years, a fatal accident in the home is the third largest cause of death. 6. No accurate estimate of the number of non-fatal accidents is available, chiefly because of the difficulty of obtaining reliable and comprehensive information about accidents in the home, which, unlike those on the roads, are not notifiable. But from the figures available from certain limited areas, some idea can be gained of the possible total for the country as a whole. 7. For instance, in 1946, out of a population of 13,000 in a congested Birming- ham area, 9 per cent. of the children under 10 and 3 per cent. of the adults were treated at the Birmingham Accidents Hospital for home accidents (4 per cent. of the total population of the area). Though it would in fact be wrong to assume that the accident rate for the country as a whole was as high as that for this area, these figures do give some indication of the possible scale of the problem. VNU
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