You may have read the title of this post and said to yourself, "Really?" That is exactly what I said when they began talking about it on the world news the other day and I was reminded of it when I saw the re-run of the story on the local news tonight. I have hit on the subject of wasted taxpayer money before for grants to perform stupid research before I started blogging (even before I was doing it on Google+) but I think this one takes the cake.
So the gist of the results of the study: something like 20% of all injuries involve stairs; 25% of those (that is a whopping 5% of all injuries) involve an adult carrying something on stairs; 25% of all injuries incurred by children involve stairs; 20% of those injuries involve a parent carrying a child down the stairs. My numbers may be a little off as the whole story aired a couple of days ago but all you really need to know is that these really represent a small portion of injuries.
I really have a two part issue with the study. The first issue has to do with the fact that this study was paid for using taxpayer dollars via a grant by the federal government. Why are we wasting money on this kind of thing? This money could have been put into assisting hospitals to upgrade to the digital age. Once that happens laws could be passed to force the hospitals to send the data to the federal government for collection. You may be worrying about privacy but they don't have to share your personal information, just the cause of the injury. What this would mean is that whenever someone was curious as to how many injuries involved stairs they would just have to make the correct selections in the report query. Not saying that it would be a report that would run instantly but it is something that could be run at a much lower cost than I'm sure this study was. And the focus of the report could easily be changed to show what you wanted (think along the lines of the breakdown above). Once the data is collected by the query - that is the hard part - the formatting of the report is rather quick, and changing the focus is really a formatting piece provided things were done correctly. We live in the computer age yet our government is paying for people to do studies that could all be done with little change to existing software. Some might say that this would mean the Federal government would then be giving a huge contract to one company to have their software in all hospitals but that isn't true. All they would have to do is specify the format of the data that is transmitted to them. With that specification they could write a routine to import it into the software that is selected for the reporting needs. This would mean that all hospitals could choose what they like and the market would be open.
The other issue that I have is the fact that the result of the study came down to what everything does in this country now, "It isn't my fault!" The study showed how the first step at the top of the staircase is normally longer than the rest of them. They then blamed this on the builders who built the stairs prior to installation and just "fudged" it to make them fit. Then they blamed the codes because there is nothing that makes doing that illegal. What happened to watching where you are walking? And they were talking about less than an inch in most cases! Open your eyes people! Put one foot in front of the other! The last thing that they decided to talk about was the large handrails that you couldn't wrap your entire hand around being to blame. Their solution you ask, get rid of the large beautiful handrail and replace it with one that is thin so that your finger can touch your hand after wrapping it around. I couldn't believe that was their solution. What they are saying there is to put something thin and flimsy on there so that anyone who were to use your stairs can wrap their hand around the rail. You guessed it, I have a better solution! Try teaching people to watch where they are walking or perhaps teach them how to grab on to a handrail to prevent themselves from falling.
The fact is that humans were not designed to walk on stairs. The only way to prevent this from happening is to eliminate stairs completely. The issue there is that once you have ramps to eliminate the stairs you are going to create a rolling problem...
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