RoSPA Press Office : Press Release
November 7, 2002
RECORD NUMBER JOIN FORCES AGAINST HOME ACCIDENTS
A record number of home safety professionals will meet next week in an attempt to beat the UK’s biggest accident problem.
Every year about 4,000 people are killed as a result of an accident in the home and more than 2.8 million seek medical assistance.
All 140 places at RoSPA’s National Home Safety Congress in York on Monday and Tuesday (Nov 11-12) have been taken in a bid to forge new partnerships to reduce the accident toll.
Every possibility of creating and sustaining partnership working will be explored at the York Viking Moat House.
Sarah Colles, RoSPA Home Safety Adviser, said: “Home safety has been a Cinderella subject for too long. But now the Government is ploughing funding into new home safety projects that we are sure will have a major impact.
“We want to build on that investment by learning from one another and finding new ways to work together to reduce accidents.”
Experts at the conference will include health visitors, doctors, trading standards officers, health promotion officers, fire and ambulance personnel, social workers, housing officers and elected members.
They will hear Melanie Johnson MP, Consumer Affairs Minister, outline the Government’s home safety campaigns at 2.30pm on Monday.
More than one million people a year are injured in falls and the conference will be told about how Help the Aged, the Department of Trade and Industry and the Department for Health have worked at a national level to combat this problem among the elderly. Child Safety Week has shown how charities, the Government and commercial organisations have united at a national level to deliver local initiatives.
Projects administered by RoSPA through the DTI’s Modernisation Fund have included fitting thermostatically-controlled taps to reduce the risk of scalding to children and exercise classes to keep older people supple in order to prevent falls.
“These schemes have proved that if organisations help each other they can do much more to reduce accidents than by working in isolation,” Sarah Colles said.
