RoSPA's Campaigning Work

Supporting RoSPA helps the Society continue its work in many areas including: raising awareness of safety issues in the home, on the road, at work and on and in water; a website to help young people stay safe at work; giving safety information to the public; and providing web-based good practice guidelines on occupational health and safety issues.

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Hot bath water severely scalds 600 people in the UK each year.

Three quarters of these seriously injured victims are children under the age of five, many of them bearing the scars of their accident for the rest of their lives. Older people are also vulnerable and it is estimated that 15 pensioners die each year as a result of a hot bath water accident. But steps can be taken to prevent more people suffering in this way.

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) is appealing for your help.

The problem

• Bath water can be delivered to taps at dangerously high temperatures – as much as 70°C in many cases.
• Scalding can occur at water temperatures above 45°C.
• At 50°C, adults can suffer third degree burns after five minutes and children after less than two minutes.
• At 60°C, the time drops to 5.4 seconds for adults and 1.5 seconds for children.
• At 70°C, it takes just 1 second for adults to suffer third degree burns and 0.27 seconds for children.
• Children and older people are more susceptible to scalds due to their sensitive skin. Other factors also play a part. Some children have accidentally slipped into baths or turned on hot taps unaware of the risk they pose. Older people might have difficulty getting out of a bath that is too hot.

A solution
Raising awareness of the risks posed by hot bath water and sharing injury prevention advice, such as always running cold water before hot and carefully testing water temperature before getting into a bath, is crucial in reducing the number of scalds.

RoSPA also recommends the use of Thermostatic Mixing Valves (TMVs) to set bath tap water temperature to a maximum of 48°C. TMVs, which blend hot and cold water, became mandatory in new and refurbished homes in Scotland in 2006 and similar legislation has also been passed in Canada, New Zealand and Australia. However, there has not yet been a change in regulations covering the rest of the UK.

RoSPA would like to see these regulations updated. We also want to raise awareness of the benefits of fitting TMVs, which cost around £80.

How you can help
RoSPA was involved in the campaign to get the law changed in Scotland to make TMVs mandatory in new and refurbished homes and is continuing to call for regulations covering the rest of the UK to be brought into line. The Society was also responsible for delivering the first pilot project to install TMVs in disadvantaged areas in Northern Ireland.

A key campaign for RoSPA in 2007 was to increase TMV installations in homes across the UK.

By donating to RoSPA you will be supporting us in our mission, helping us to save more lives through this and other important campaigns.

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Safety on the Roads
RoSPA’s Road Safety department has been involved in a number of government consultations. The most notable success achieved in recent years has been the law banning the use of hand-held mobile phones while driving which followed a long campaign by RoSPA including much media work and many interventions by RoSPA Presidents in Parliament. Our research proving that driving whilst using a mobile phone is dangerous was extensively quoted in the Government’s consultation paper.

In addition to this, the Management of Occupational Road Risk (MORR) has been a key issue on RoSPA’s agenda for many years now, following research by RoSPA with other organisations, which suggests that more workers (i.e. people at work) die in road accidents than in all RIDDOR reportable accidents.

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Safety in and around Water
The RoSPA Water & Leisure Safety department is a key partner in the water safety campaigning of the European Child Safety Alliance and has been responsible for bringing the serious issue of child tourist drownings within the EU to the attention of this group.

In addition, the team successfully raised as an issue with UK government their responsibility for water safety which has culminated in the setting up of the UK’s National Water Safety Forum and the ‘one stop shop’ for water safety information for the public and site operators -the NWSF Website.

RoSPA is also a member of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office working group that developed the ‘Know before you go campaign’ aimed at young and independent travellers.

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Safety in the Home
The National Home & Leisure Safety Committee brings together over 20 organisations with an involvement in Home Safety. The Committee is promoting a reduction of VAT on safety equipment, a ban on the sale of babywalkers and the development of new sources of home accident data. In particular the department works closely with the Child Accident Prevention Trust, Age Concern, Help the Aged and the National Community Fire Safety Centre.

RoSPA's Home Safety department published a Housing Policy Statement ( PDF format 455kb) in 2002 outlining 10 inexpensive ways of making the home environment of new dwellings safer. One of the statements calls for thermostatic mixing valves (TMVs) to be fitted to the bath taps in new dwellings so that water is delivered at 46°C from the tap. The Scottish Building Standards Agency is now consulting on this issue and England and Wales are planning to do so early this year.

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Safety in Education
RoSPA has worked closely with various government departments over the last 5 years, primarily the DfES in writing Safety Education guidance. The overarching issue in Safety Education over the past few years has been the poor understanding of risk from all levels in society. By focusing on two key issues, the work of the department has been shaped, those issues being:

• the need for a framework for risk education (to raise the standard of risk education in schools) and
• to raise the profile of risk education in schools and other educational establishments.

The LASER (Learning About Safety by Experiencing Risk) Project began at RoSPA in April 1999. This project, funded by the Department of Health, ultimately aims to establish good practice guidelines for interactive safety education schemes for children such as Crucial Crew and Junior Citizen. These 'LASER' schemes have proliferated throughout the whole of the UK since 1986 when the first Junior Citizen was established in London. Such initiatives now attract some of the greatest efforts in accident prevention education for 9-11 year old children.

More recently, the LASER Steering Group made recommendations to take this work forward and seek further funding to develop Quality Standards and an Accreditation process. RoSPA applied to the DoH and was successful in gaining a further three years of funding to carry out this work. This was announced in the White Paper ‘Choosing Health’ in November 2004 which stated that ‘RoSPA were commissioned to establish an Accreditation Scheme for Safety Centres across England to sustain best practice and new ways of delivering accident prevention messages’.