I’ve been obsessing over buying a TV set. I missed buying one for cheap last Boxing Day, so now I annoy my better half by announcing the latest deals I find every day on various internet sites and newspaper flyers. Whilst leafing through the TV issue of the very informative Consumer Reports magazine (March 2009), I came across an interesting survey they did on Americans’ risky behaviour.
Amongst percentages of Americans that don’t tighten their seatbelts (24%) and eat raw cookie dough (39%--I don’t believe it’s this low for a second!), two other stats made me think about my own level of safety awareness:
21% of Americans surveyed change the batteries in smoke alarm regularly.
18% of Americans change the lint trap in their dryer after each use.
These numbers are significant in terms of fire safety. Just the other day my smoke detector went off in the middle of the night, signaling a possible fire in our building. It turned out to be a false alarm, but I was glad it worked anyway. What if I only had a regular fire alarm with batteries? If it didn’t beep when it was time to change the batteries (as the directions say it will), I’m sure I’d leave my AA’s in there long enough to corrode.
I only know about the importance of cleaning the lint trap because the salesman who sold me my current clothes dryer told me he’s dealt with more than a few dryer fires over the years. The dryer vent gets clogged with flammable lint, the heat gets more intense because it can’t ventilate, and boom! You’ve got yourself a fire in your dryer. If you infer that Canadian statistics are similar to U.S. ones, that means that 88% of people out there with dryers might be at risk of starting a fire in their homes.
When was the last time you cleaned out the lint trap in your dryer or checked and replaced the batteries in your fire detector?
Watching the world’s top athletes push their bodies to the limit makes me ponder how little physical activity I’m getting.
I, like so many Canadians, have become a couch potato watching the 2010 Winter Olympics on TV.
The most activity I got this weekend was when I stood up to celebrate our first Gold Medal on Canadian soil. I quickly sat down after that.
Despite my deplorable lack of physical activity this weekend, I know sitting in front of the TV all weekend is the rule, not the exception for many British Columbians. If you’re getting into your later years, physical activity can be difficult, and watching TV isn’t. A nutritionist on Vancouver Island wrote an interesting article about the challenges the elderly face when it comes to preventing injury.
My parents are getting older, and they’ve changed their lifestyle to accommodate life changes like a growing lack of mobility. Preventing injury for the elderly is important considering statistics like,
“…People over 50 who have a hip fracture are dead within one year”
If you’re getting older or you know someone who is, what tips do you have for keeping the older generation safe from injury?
I take vitamins. I take too many vitamins. I used to never take pills of any kind, but I recently started taking multivitamins. I also recently injured my back ( a whole other story), so I’ve been taking some pain-killers. The directions say to take two every six hours. I’m supposed to take one multivitamin pill a day. But yesterday I popped two multivitamins into my mouth. Why did I do that? Maybe I’m too busy, and I confused the dose with that of my pain killers. Perhaps I can’t resist their candy-like appearance. I don’t know. Regardless of why I did it, it happened. And I might have done it before.
So is taking too many vitamins a problem? I’m still here to type this blog.
I read the pill bottle for what’s packed into each orange-coloured multi-vitamin I ingest, and I get the same feeling I got in grade school when I realized I had to learn the periodic table: bewilderment followed by fear. I really have no idea which vitamins I already get in my food each day and if I’m getting too many by throwing a multivitamin into my digestive process.
Preventable.ca conducted a poll last month on poisoning. The answer to the poll is that poisoning is most likely to occur at home. But can taking too many vitamins really end up in poisoning? Opinions within the health industry are mixed. And where do soluble vitamins fit in to this discussion? Young people seem to be more of a concern for over vitamizing (I just made that up) our bodies.
The other day I read about how a certain BC utility company makes safety a priority with their employees. This unto itself isn’t surprising, but when I say employees, I mean all employees. This includes the ones working outside in possible harm’s way and the hundreds of workers in offices with job titles that suggest paper cuts would be the most gruesome of injuries they could be exposed to. In reality, office work can have serious health problems especially if your environment isn’t ergonomically sound. Just ask anyone with carpal tunnel syndrome.
This company even discusses how employees can prevent injuries! The name of this company isn’t important. What’s important is the desire for safety to be the responsibility of everyone in the company.
Seeing how progressive this company is with safety concerns got me thinking about my exposure to safety measures at work. Rather, it’s more accurate to say safety messages my employers didn’t exposed me to.
When I was a gawky teen, I did pretty much any job that paid more than the last. I really don’t remember any concerted efforts to try to steer me from danger.
I recall working at a gas station and being asked to fill someone’s car with propane. Wanting to please the boss on my first day of work, I said I was fine to do so thinking, “How different can this be from pumping regular gas into cars?” It’s a lot different actually. While the liquid gradually filled the tank, I realized my hands had frozen into claw-like objects. I didn’t know you needed gloves to properly handle this amazingly cold substance that can cause frostbite quite quickly. I did manage to finish filling up the car, but I couldn’t feel my hands for about ten minutes.
Having worked at a large Canadian media outlet for a few years, I remember someone mentioning a safety document but was never actually told I had to know anything or even read anything to do with any sort of safety at the workplace.
Hell, I don’t even know if I could find the first-aid kit or if one even existed, let alone know what to do in case of a fire.
When I watch large-scale disasters on TV news like floods, fires, earthquakes, and the like, I sometimes think what I would do if one of those situations happened to me in Vancouver. If at home I’d know what to do, but at work, I can honestly say I have no plan.
Personally, I’d like to have a plan for dealing with injuries or disasters at work. Maybe I should make one.
Tell me, does your workplace have a plan to prevent injuries?
When you do something long enough, you tend to forget what it was like learning how to do it in the first place. Months ago, when I wrote my first blog for Preventableca, I had a rudimentary understanding of what preventable injuries were and how they could be avoided. After months of blogging about helmets, medications, Sudoku, and Christmas lights, I now feel like the poster boy for preventable injuries.
The Community Against Preventable Injuries responded that,
“We know that most people know how to prevent injuries. The problem is that most people continue to take risks believing that, ‘It won’t happen to me.’”
The Community’s response went on to explain how our approach is to encourage discussion, not tell people what to do. And that, “If we’ve made someone consider their possibly dangerous behaviours for the first time in their life, even if most people don’t immediately change their ways, we’ve made progress in preventing needless injuries in the future.”
This questioning of our methods is part of the dialogue we want to promote on the issue of preventable injuries. It seems to me that dangerous habits are often either not talked about or are simply given lip service.
This got me thinking about how people communicate about preventable injuries in their lives, if at all. Is it parents giving their children the morning mantra, “Look both ways before you cross the street”? Is it discussions around dinner tables about the new electronic device ban in vehicles? Or is it campaigns like our and others that hopefully make people think about what they do?
It’s time to join the discussion. How do you persuade those in your life to be safe?
It can be argued that the term “multiculturalism” has become synonymous with the word “Canada.” When we pair the term with the word “Metro Vancouver,” multiculturalism almost seems redundant. There are people from all over the world living in Vancouver. With so many people bringing their unique histories and backgrounds to one place, there comes different ways of seeing the world, including different priories and opinions.
When it comes to safety, not only is there a difference of attitudes between cultures, there’s a difference in attitudes even between people within and between any given culture. Take Cary (not her real name) for example:
Cary is 27 and came to Canada from Beijing, China, at the age of five. For the most part, I’d say she is a very safety-conscious person. She’s a careful and responsible driver. She doesn’t bike much now, but when she was young, she always wore a helmet when she rode. When she does take medicine, she reads the labels and is careful not to mix pills without double -checking that they’re safe.
Her parents, Cary says, are also safety conscious. But she suggests that people who come here from China have different attitudes when it comes to safety.
“In China there just aren’t any safety regulations. Even now there just aren’t those kinds of rules. People have their own sense of what it takes to be safe.”
Cary went on to tell me that back home,
“They’re not used to government control of smaller things like safety. When you’re coming into Canada, there’s no manual that tells you what to do. They learn from reading newspapers and speaking to people.”
When I asked her how people in China determine how they’ll be more safe in their lives, she told me that people determine what’s dangerous by reading and hearing about tragedies in the media or from people around them, not through any formal safety education or awareness campaigns.
From my interview with Cary I learned that she formed her attitudes on safety by combining her parents examples with safety leasons she learned at school. Speaking to Cary made me thing about how Canadian culture itself shapes how safe we are.
One possibly unsafe thing Cary does in her life is ski without a helmet. She learned to ski in Canada, but when I told her that Intrawest ski hills recommend that all skiers on their hills wear a helmet, she told me that she never really thought about it. “I’ve always thought of myself as a low-key recreational skier”, said Cary.
“It’s different when you ski, you usually fall sideways, which isn’t as dangerous.”
All this safety and culture talk has me wondering, are your attitudes on safety shaped by your cultural background, Canadian culture, both, or neither?
If you’re reading this and walked through snow when you left your home or business this morning, then you might have to pay a price for doing so. As of 10 AM the day after a snowfall, Vancouverites who haven‘t cleaned their sidewalks in front of their residences and businesses could pay up to $2000 dollars! That cost doesn’t include the physical hardship of slipping on your icy driveway. With a mix of rain and snow this week in Metro Vancouver, it’s wise to be careful on sidewalks and to keep them clear to avoid injury.
Now before you rush home to find that shovel, stop, and take a breath. Believe it or not, shoveling snow can take its toll on your body, especially if you live in an area that was covered with substantial amounts of snow overnight. Shoveling incorrectly can hurt your back and even lead to a heart attack. A couple of tips are to bend your knees and take breaks. And if you really want to make shoveling easier, you might want to invest in one of these new shovels invented by a couple of Northern BC brothers.
Now that we have our first good snowfall of the year, have you thought about your shoveling technique?
But using your ladder correctly is only one way to keep safe hanging lights this season. Do you have your own tips on how to make hanging lights safer?
What can be said that hasn’t already been said about poisoning due to mixing medication incorrectly? A lot, I discovered.
I found myself in a pharmacy the other day talking to strangers (as I’m prone to do). I was searching for our latest campaign (see photo) when a nice older lady asked me what I was doing. I told her about Preventable and how poisoning due to incorrectly mixing medication affects more than 20,000 British Columbians each year and that more than half are children less than six years of age (BC Drug and Poison Information Centre, 2009). She asked me how to avoid these poisonings, and I told her that one way is to read the packaging carefully, including the warnings regarding acceptable doses. Thinking I’d done my job informing another British Columbian about a preventable injury, I started to walk away. But then something unexpected happened.
“Reading the label is easy if you can find it,” she said.
This lady gave me some insight into the challenges of making sure your don’t poison yourself by mixing medications incorrectly. She told me that sometimes medication directions are on the inside of the box, not on the actual bottle of medications itself. This elderly woman said that she usually throws the boxes away, thinking they’re of no use to her and not knowing at the time that she’s thrown out the medication directions.
If our knowledgeable senior citizens can’t figure out which medications can be poisonous, then how can we expect kids to know any better? And with painkiller overdoses on the rise in Canada, handling medications properly is a subject that’s becoming increasingly more important.
What are your concerns about safety and medication?.
I just reclaimed my Christmas decorations from the depths of my storage area. They were next to a sun umbrella, camping chairs, and other items sprung from their dark prison once annually. It’s always fun to look through the Yuletide accoutrement, isn’t it? Well, yes, until you find that ball of plastic and glass also known as Christmas lights.
If you’re lucky like me, you don’t have to worry about crawling on your roof to hang a string of lights that hopefully work. I learned the hard and cold way many years ago to check the string of pretty lights before trying to hang them. You see, I live in a building that doesn’t allow hanging light. So even if I wanted to hang them, it wouldn’t be up to me.
...he said there were a few minutes when his legs were dangling over the edge, and he thought he was going over.
I remember my old man putting up the lights each year. No, my pops wasn’t extravagant like the Griswold's in Christmas Vacation. My family home had a conservative array of lighting. Usually, my Dad would run a line on an eavestrough and throw a few strings haphazardly on a tree or two. It wasn’t remarkable, but it did the trick. And it just didn’t feel like Christmas without them.
A few years back, my elderly pops got up on the roof against my mother’s better judgment and proceeded to deck the house with lights. It was snowing outside, and he slipped. He didn’t fall off, but he said there were a few minutes when his legs were dangling over the edge, and he thought he was going over. I’ve mentioned this story to others, and almost every time the person I’m speaking with has a similar story.
If you can’t afford to hire one of those light hanging companies (yes, they do exist), then you’d be wise to take a minute and review this ladder safety diagram. And if you forget to check the diagram, Preventable has a billboard on Expo Blvd & Nelson on the South East corner to remind you. Because, you want to hang your lights, not hang from them.
