A Slip & Fall’s Prime Victim

When I first started this business, my first job was the shower floor of an elderly woman. She said she could only pay half of what I was asking. Honestly, the money wasn’t as important as providing as safe floor for this elderly woman. She was someone’s mother and grandma. She was living in constant danger of serious injury and here I was, the one who could make that danger go away. I agreed to help her, even though I was barely making enough money to cover my gas. Didn’t seem as important to be honest.

Many people have asked me how I got into the floor safety business. It’s actually a pretty straight forward story.

My mom, who is a breast cancer survivor (three times actually), slipped and fell in a shower. She hurt her knee badly and ended up having to have knee replacement surgery. She suffered through the pain for several years.

Making sure that she never slips again, would be something I can actually control unlike her battle with cancer.

So I began my research into some sort of solution to slippery floors. I looked at the statistics of slip and fall accidents and found that many victims to the painful ‘slip and fall,’ are the elderly. Due to muscle weakness, walking or gait problems, our elderly are more prone to seriously injuring themselves due to a Slip and Fall accident.

• The National Safety Council reports that the leading cause of injury-related deaths for adults 65 years of age or older, is slip and fall injuries.

• The CDC reports that about 3 million people over the age of 65 are treated in an emergency room for a fall each year.

• One out of five falls causes a serious injury such as broken bones or a head injury.

• Falls cause the great majority of hip fractures in older adults.

• Slip and Fall injuries are the leading cause of workers’ compensation claims and are the leading cause of occupational injury for people 55 years and older!

• Each year, one out of every three persons over the age of 65 will experience a fall.

• Of all fall-related deaths, 60% involve people aged 75 years or older.

• Over 60% of nursing home residents will experience a fall each year.

The above information is taken from The National Floor Safety Institute website.

Over the years, I have encountered many elderly people who have reached out for help. Some called because they wanted to prevent future falls. Others called because someone they knew fell and hurt themselves badly. But many, unfortunately, call because of a fall that changed their lives forever.

About a year ago, I received a call from a lady in her late 60s. She had a very slick patio and asked me if I could look at it. When I arrived, we tested the area and saw that the outdoor patio was extremely dangerous, well below the 0.42 wet DCOF that ANSI A326.3 references for interior level floors walked on wet (an outdoor patio like hers sits in the exterior-wet category and is best judged with the wet pendulum).

She told me how her husband slipped on the tile two years ago and spent several months in the hospital. The injury ended up being more severe because he was at an early stage of bone marrow cancer. She said that the fall made the cancer worse and put him through so much pain. He ended up dying after 18 months of pain and suffering.

Would he had still passed away if he had not taken that fall? I don’t know. There’s no way of knowing that.

But I do not know that he wouldn’t have spent as much time in the hospital in severe pain. I do know that the problem could have been fixed because, so far, we have improved the traction of the surfaces we have treated.

We ended up fixing her patio and after re-testing it showed low slip potential under the tested wet condition, which lowers her risk even though no floor can guarantee that no one will ever slip.

There are many other stories that I can write on here regarding this subject, but reading those stories mean nothing if we aren’t motivated to protecting our grandparents.

My grandparents are no longer with us. I was very close to them and I loved them deeply. If they were still with us though, knowing the information I know now, I would do my absolute best to make sure all their floors are safe for them to walk on. I would make sure that their shower floors, bathtubs, front patios, pool decks, kitchen floors, any surface they walk on, I would test it and, where needed, treat it to raise its wet slip resistance.

For the past two years, we have all masked up and stayed a good distance from our elderly for fear of infecting them with Covid19. We care for them and want them to live as long as possible. Let’s also care for their safety when it comes to slip and fall accidents.

Call today if you have a loved one in your lives that you want to protect. As certified floor safety experts, credentialed through the University of North Texas College of Engineering, we are more than confident that we can offer the safety and assurance of a properly tested and treated floor.

Get a free quote or call 1-833-DIAL-WMG to have your floors tested.