Accessible Bathrooms in Durham Region | 6 Bathroom Safety Checks

Accessible Bathrooms in Durham Region: Six Things to Check Before a Patient Goes Home

For discharge planners, hospital social workers, community case managers and families preparing someone to return home, bathroom safety can become an important part of discharge planning. Quacy Barry of BCR Basements shares six practical things to look for when assessing a bathroom in Durham Region and elsewhere in Ontario.

Written for discharge planners, hospital social workers and community case managers.

Six things to check before a patient goes home to a bathroom nobody has looked at

A discharge date is set. The family says the bathroom is fine. Three weeks later the patient is back in emergency.

I have been building bathrooms in Ontario for twenty years and I have lost count of the homes where the bathroom was described as fine and was not. Not because anybody lied. Because the things that make a bathroom unsafe are not the things people notice.

Here are six you can check yourself, in about ten minutes, without any trade knowledge.

1. What is the person actually holding on to?

Look for a towel bar, a soap dish, or the edge of a vanity near the bath. Take hold of it and pull, properly, the way somebody would if their foot slipped. If it moves at all it may not provide the structural support someone expects from a properly installed grab bar.

This is the single most common finding in a bathroom that has never been modified. Not a missing grab bar. A towel bar being used as one.

2. Measure the door, with the door open.

Not the frame. The actual clear opening from the face of the open door to the stop on the far side. A walker is typically around 24 to 27 inches wide at the handgrips and, as a practical planning guideline, needs roughly 32 inches of clear width to pass comfortably straight through.

Plenty of Ontario homes built before 1980 have a 24 inch bathroom door. If the patient is coming home with a walker, this decides everything else. A perfectly equipped bathroom behind a narrow door is not accessible, and widening a door can become a framing change rather than an afternoon adjustment.

3. Count the bathrooms.

This determines what is realistic, not what is ideal. Any conversion that removes the bathtub takes days, not hours. Where there is one bathroom in the house and nowhere else to wash, a build that takes a week is usually abandoned by the family regardless of how correct it is.

If the discharge is time bound, ask what can be done in a day before asking what would be best.

4. Look at the floor of the shower or bath, wet.

Run the tap and put a hand flat on the surface. Older glazed tile and worn acrylic can both become genuinely slippery. You do not need a technical measurement to identify an obvious concern. You need to know whether it feels slick, because that is what a bare foot will find.

5. Turn the tap and wait.

If the temperature swings when a toilet is flushed elsewhere in the house, the valve may not provide the temperature control expected from a modern pressure-balanced system. If the water reaches scalding temperatures without resistance, the temperature setting should also be investigated.

For a patient with reduced sensation in their hands or feet, including someone living with diabetic neuropathy or post-stroke changes, this can create a burn risk they may not immediately feel.

6. Ask when the house was built.

If the answer is before 1990, any future work involving demolition should raise the question of whether asbestos-containing materials may be present before the work starts. Vinyl floor tile, the mastic under it, and some joint compounds from that era are common materials that may require investigation.

This matters to you because it is the most frequent cause of a bathroom project stopping halfway. A crew opens a floor, somebody recognises the tile, work stops, and a family is arranging licensed abatement with the bathroom in pieces and a patient at home.

What to do with the answers

If the door is under 30 inches and a walker is coming home, raise it before the discharge, not after. It changes the scope, the cost and the timeline more than anything else on this list.

If the answer to question one is a towel bar, that is fixable this week by someone competent, and it should not wait for a larger project.

And if a family tells you a contractor has quoted a bathroom without asking about the door width or the number of bathrooms, that is worth a second opinion.

Bathroom Safety Checklist for Discharge Planning

A printable version of this checklist is free at bcrbasements.com/accessible-bathrooms/for-occupational-therapists . There is no form and no email required.