GUEST COMMENT by PAUL LEWIS
Our hygiene standards have been questionable for some time.
Take for example, the ubiquitous public toilet.
You enter the toilet by pushing the door open.
You enter the facility and if your are female or need number two, you enter the cubical and lock the door, sit down and do your business.
When you have finished, you unlock the door, presumably wash your hands thoroughly, dry them and then pull the facility door to open it to exit.
All sounds cool and straightforward!
But, if you haven’t washed your hands or not washed them properly, you may leave bacteria on the toilet door, taps and wherever else.
Finally you pull the door to exit the facility and leave bacteria on the door handle. The person who has washed their hands properly, touches one of those surfaces and finally the door handle and gets the bacteria.
Sounds complex, so why not have push to exit the toilets rather than pull to exit? Why not have touchless taps?
It’s all pretty simple, we just need to look outside the box for a change.
I heard good old white vinegar is a great cleaning product.
While visiting the loo at the Rijksmuseum, in Amsterdam, I was intrigued to find glass self opening doors into the unisex washroom area.
There was a floor foot ‘button’ to activate the flush and a foot button again to supply water to the hand basin. That was back in 1978.
Sometime in the 80s, when living at home with my parents in Bundaberg, my mother collapsed in the toilet. Nobody could get in to assist her as she had fallen against the door.
I was skinny enough to squeeze in and manoeuvre her around so she could be helped.
I was talking about that incident years later and she mentioned that because of her incident and obviously others like it, there was a law or rule that came in that stated that doors must open outwards for that reason.
This report brought back that memory, so I did some research on it and yes it appears to be true, in most cases, under the building code. Interesting.
@ Ray: I was looking at more the hygiene side but you raise a very good point.
As councils and governments seem to be exempt from their own rules it’s a challenge. Even for their own facilities.
If they were aeroplanes they would be retrofitted.
Surprised, if the government and councils were aeroplanes they would not have even have gotten off the runway!