Anna and I visited an entertainment park close to our home when a family visited us recently. There are different water sports for children and adults.
One of them was this rail car travelling to a height with people inside and slide down into a pool of water with a thud and splash of water all around and fully getting wet!
For about five hours we were in the park, all the water sports arena brimmed with young and old alike participating enthusiastically.
On a day when the temperature was soaring to 43 degree celsius, it was a welcome change for all of them.
What stayed with me after the visit to this theme park was the enormous facilities created for the visitors and how safety and comfort are well looked into. The whole facility looked child friendly and safe for children as well.
Let me suggest this: the greatest challenge to our planners and designers of smart cities in india is to offer high standards of safety for all, particularly for children!
In the hospital where I work, I went around yesterday to look if all the railing along the stair cases are safe for children. To my surprise, I was shocked to find them otherwise.
When the Maternal and Child health building in CMC Hospital, Vellore was built in the centenary year of the hospital, I remember experiencing a stiff resistance form the architects to reduce the distance between the vertical rods of the railing from 9 inches to 4 inches for the sake of safety for children. If the director had not supported that change, the six floor building would have had a safety risk for children.
This dawned on me following an ugly experience. The child development centre of ASHIRVAD, where Anna and I began our clinical work in Chennai in 1983 was located in a double storied building. The consultation room was on the first floor with an open space infront of the room leading to the stair case. One day a two year child slipped between the vertical rods of the stair case railing and fell down from a height of eight feet. Fortunately child escaped unhurt. That same evening we got the railing covered with wire netting to make it child proof and changed the consultation room to a room in the ground floor.
Since then, I inspect the stair case railings whenever I visit a multistories buildings and leave a comment in the visitor's book, if there is one, with a request to make the railings child proof.
No comments:
Post a Comment