Being a responsible homeowner comes with many duties: pay your mortgage on time if you’ve decided to take out a loan, call out for repairs when something is damaged, and take care of your utility bills each month. Many new buyers forget about the responsibility of keeping your home clean to eliminate safety hazards for other residents and guests. While staying tidy is a common practice of both renters and homeowners for their own sake, it’s also a crucial legal liability that shouldn’t be taken lightly.
Why mess matters
Unfortunately, messes can hurt. Slip and falls inside the home are common, although many of them are thankfully minor. Sometimes harmless trips turn into more serious accidents, leading to emergency room visits, medical bills, and potentially life-changing injuries. In these instances, you might look back thinking of how much easier it would have been to keep a regular cleaning routine and tidy up before hazards appeared.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) details the following statistics that help shed a light on the importance of maintaining a mess-free home:
- One out of three older people falls each year
- Less than half of older people who fall report the incident to their doctor
- One out of five falls causes a serious injury (broken bones, head injury)
- Every year, 2.5 million older people are treated in the emergency room for fall-related injuries
- Over 700,000 people per year are hospitalized due to a fall
- More than 95 percent of hip fractures are caused by (often sideways) falls
- Falls are the most common cause of traumatic brain injuries
- The direct medical costs for fall injuries are $34 billion per year, adjusted for inflation
Risk of Falls
Falls don’t always result in a major, life-changing injury. Broken wrists, arms, ankles, and hip fractures are more common and heal with proper medical attention and appropriate follow-up care. Head injuries, on the other hand, are more critical, especially because individuals don’t always know they have one until it’s too late.
The CDC provides four necessary steps to limit the number of tripping hazards in your home, including clearing the floors of things you can trip over, adding grab bars on the inside and outside of tubs and showers, putting railings on both sides of staircases, and making sure homes are well-lit by adding more, brighter bulbs.
Here at Eagle Mat, we want homeowners to keep their properties safe to limit injuries to themselves and those around them. You may associate safety floor mats with commercial properties, but our products extend beyond the workplace and into the home. For more information on what mats make sense for residential use, contact us directly at 877-333-1018.
