When we think of home, our first thoughts are often of safety, security, and warmth. Many of us see our homes as our personal safe space in the world, a place where we can relax and unwind away from the stresses of life. Rarely, if ever, do we consider how we might potentially injure ourselves during daily activities around the house.
However, studies continuously show that the home is one of the most common places for accidents to occur; unfortunately, we Brits can be a rather accident-prone lot. In fact, you might be surprised to find out that in the last 12 months alone, the average adult in the UK injured themselves at least twice while at home.
An accident at home can range from something as simple as a cut or bruise to potentially life-changing accident. Many of us have pulled a muscle while manually handling boxes or tending to the garden, but injuries can happen anywhere in the home.
To find out which areas of a typical UK household see the most accidents, and help you avoid injuring yourself in the future, we polled 2,000 Brits to find out whether they’d been injured in the last twelve months, where they suffered this injury, and what it was that injured them.
The top 5 most dangerous areas of the home
Perhaps it should come as little surprise that the most accident-heavy room in any household is the kitchen. While everyone knows they need to be careful when cooking, the use of knives, boiling water, and hot ovens makes accidents almost inevitable. As a result, 46.1% of all injuries from those we spoke to happened in the kitchen.
The next most accident-prone area of the home is the garden, following closely behind the kitchen with 35.6% of accidents occurring here. Again, with the numerous tools and gadgets we use while tending to our backyard, it shouldn’t come as a huge shock that many people end up suffering some form of gardening injury.
What might be more surprising is that 17.8% of person injuries in the home seem to occur in the living room. You might be wondering how someone could injure themselves while sitting on the sofa, but furniture-related injuries are far more common than you might think. Whether it’s missing the edge of your seat or trapping your hand behind the cushions in search of your phone, the humble couch and coffee table are responsible for more than a few injuries.
For the fourth most dangerous room, we come to the bathroom, with 17% of injuries happening on its slick surfaces. In many ways, it might come as a surprise that the rate of injury here is lower than in the living room, especially considering how wet bathrooms can get, but it seems people take greater care to avoid slipping in the bath than when sitting down.
Last but not least, the fifth most dangerous place in the home is the stairs. While visions of tumbling head over heel down one or more flights can be the stuff of nightmares, stair injuries are thankfully far less common than is often portrayed in soaps and the modern media.
The five most common household items that cause injuries
So, now you know what rooms to be most careful in, let’s take a look at the five most common household items that are likely to cause you injury.
Unsurprisingly, with kitchens being the most likely place to suffer an injury in the home, knives and hobs are the top causes of injury in the average UK house. Kitchen knives make up for 19.4% of all injuries in our study, while hob burns contribute a further 9.6%.
General kitchen furniture also ranks highly for injuries around the home, responsible for 9.1% of those reported to us. With chairs and tables often being used as makeshift stools to reach high places, uncareful footing can potentially lead to falls.
Further trips, slips, and falls often happen due to wet floors, something 7.9% of those we asked had the misfortune of experiencing. As for our final culprit for injuries around the home, 7.3% of individuals asked had experienced an accident involving the use of various gardening equipment.
The UK cities with the worst home injuries
With those stats in mind, hopefully, you now know what to look out for to avoid potential injuries in the home. And as an added bonus, we’ve used the data gathered to estimate which cities are the most accident-prone in the UK.
At the top of the list is Manchester, with 81.7% of homeowners having suffered an accident around their house, closely followed by Norwich which saw 76.8% of adults admitting to at-home injuries. Other top cities include Bristol, Newcastle, and Glasgow, with 73.9%, 72.1%, and 71.2% of those we asked, respectively, having suffered an injury at home.
If you want to find out more about injuries around cities in the UK, you can take a look at our piece on the UK’s most accident-prone cities.
Many of the injuries we experience in life can be avoided if we pay just a little bit more attention. But sometimes, we suffer due to someone else’s negligence.
Here at The Compensation Experts, we work with personal solicitors who have experience in handling accident at home cases; if you were the victim of an accident at home that wasn’t your fault, get in touch to see what compensation you could be eligible for. In the meantime, check out all the latest from our team of experts!