How to Do a Room-by-Room Home Safety Walkthrough

Walk through as a recorder, not a fixer

The first instinct is to fix things as you go. Resist it for one afternoon.

There are two reasons. You will stop after the third room, exhausted, with half a house unlooked at. And you will make changes nobody has assessed, which matters more than it sounds.

Today's job is one pass with a notebook. You write what you see. You do not decide what should change. An occupational therapist, a physiotherapist or your parent's doctor decides that, and they can only do it well if someone has done exactly what you are about to do.

Set the format before you start. One line per observation. Room named. No judgement words.

Write: "Top of stairs, bulb out since June." Not: "The stairs are dangerous."

Write: "Bath mat, no rubber backing, slides on tile." Not: "She is going to fall."

The neutral version is the one you can show your mum without an argument, and the one a professional can act on. The emotional version starts a row and tells the OT nothing.

Tell your parent what you are doing before you start, and why. "I am writing down what is in each room so we have a proper list for the OT visit" is a very different afternoon from wandering the house frowning at the carpet.

• One line per observation, never a paragraph
• Name the room at the start of every line
• Describe the object, not the risk
• Date every page and sign it
• Photograph each room from the doorway before you write anything
• Leave a blank right-hand column headed "Raised with"

What to carry, and how long it takes

A clipboard with one sheet per room, or a note on your phone with one heading per room. A tape measure. A torch, for cupboards and the loft hatch. Your phone, for photographs.

A two-bedroom house takes 45 to 90 minutes if you genuinely do not stop to fix things. Do it in daylight. Then do a second pass after dark that looks at nothing but light, which takes ten minutes.

Photographs are worth more than you expect. Stand in each doorway and take one wide shot. Date-stamped photographs settle the sibling conversation that begins "it cannot be that bad," and they let a professional see a room without visiting it.

Measure while you are there. These numbers get asked for later, and having them on paper can save a wasted appointment.

Also note the make and model of anything with a plug and a heating element: the cooker, the immersion heater, the electric blanket, the fan heater in the back bedroom. You are not judging them. You are recording what is in the house so that whoever services or replaces them has the details in front of them.

• Front and back door: number of steps, and the rise of each in cm
• Doorway widths, especially bathroom and bedroom
• Bed: floor to top of mattress
• The armchair they actually use: floor to seat
• Toilet: floor to top of seat
• Bath: floor to top of rim. Shower tray lip height
• Distance from the bed to the bathroom door
• Width of the narrowest point in the hall

The way in, the hall and the stairs

Start outside the front door and work inwards, because that is the order everyone arriving uses: the delivery driver, the carer who has never been before, an ambulance crew.

Outside, you are looking at the approach. The path surface, the lighting, whether the house number can be read from the road after dark, whether the bins block the route, and how the door is opened. Write down what kind of lock it is and whether there is a key safe.

Inside the front door, look at the first three metres. This is where coats, post, shoes and shopping accumulate, and it is the part of the house nobody sees any more because they walk it fifty times a day.

On the stairs, describe rather than assess. How many steps. Whether there is a rail, on which side, and whether it runs the full length. What the treads are covered with. Where the light switches are.

Do not decide today whether a second rail is needed, or whether a stairlift is the answer. Write down what is there. "Is a second rail appropriate here" is a question for an occupational therapist, and your notes are what makes their answer quick and specific.

• Path: surface, cracks, moss, slope, and whether it is lit
• House number: readable from the street after dark?
• Front door: lock type, key safe present, who holds the code
• Threshold: step up or level, height in cm
• Hall: what is on the floor between the door and the first room
• Stairs: step count, rail (side, full length or not), covering, straight or turned
• Switches: one at the bottom and one at the top, or only one?
• Where the post lands, and whether anyone picks it up

Kitchen, bathroom, bedroom

These three rooms produce most of the notes, so give them most of the time.

In the kitchen, record where the everyday things live and at what height: the kettle, the mugs, the tea, the bin, the cleaning products. Note whether anything used daily sits above shoulder height or below knee height, and whether there is a step stool in the room. Look at the floor covering and whether it lifts anywhere. Check dates in the fridge and write down what you found rather than quietly throwing it out.

In the bathroom, describe the fixtures and what is fixed to the wall. There is a real difference between a screwed-in rail and a suction-cup one, and between a towel rail and something designed to take weight. Say which is which. Note the floor covering, the mat, the lock, and whether the door opens inwards or outwards.

In the bedroom, note the route from the bed to the door and to the bathroom, what is in that route, the lamp situation, and whether the phone can be reached from the bed.

Everywhere: write what you saw, not what you concluded. "Suction rail beside bath, moves when pulled" is an observation. "Needs a proper grab rail" is a recommendation, and it is not yours to make.

• Kitchen: height of the shelf holding daily items
• Kitchen: is there a step stool, and does it have a handle
• Kitchen: cooker type, and what sits near the hob
• Bathroom: every rail, fixed or suction, and where
• Bathroom: door opens in or out, and is there a bolt
• Bathroom: mat type and whether it has a backing
• Bedroom: what is between the bed and the door
• Bedroom: lamp and phone within reach of the bed
• Every room: extension leads, trailing cables, what is plugged into what

The after-dark pass

Go back after sunset and walk the same route using the lights the way your parent uses them, not the way you would.

Stand at the bottom of the stairs and switch on only what they switch on. Walk from the bedroom to the bathroom without turning on a main light, because that is the trip that actually happens at three in the morning. Note what you can and cannot see.

Write down bulb wattages where you can read them. A landing that is dim may simply have a 40W bulb in a fitting rated for more. That is a fact worth recording rather than a decision to make in the dark.

The after-dark pass finds things the daylight pass cannot: a hall with no switch at the far end, a bedside lamp with a small fiddly switch, a night light that stopped working months ago, curtains that make a room completely black.

Ten minutes. It usually produces three or four of the most useful lines on the whole list.

Turn your notes into one page other people can use

Raw notes are for you. What you hand over is one page.

Give it a header: the address, the date you walked through, your name and your phone number. Group the lines by room, in the order someone would walk them. Then add a right-hand column headed "Raised with" and leave it empty. That column is what turns a list into a record.

Print three copies. One goes in the front of the caregiver binder. One goes to the sibling who is not there. One lives in your bag, because the single most useful thing you can do at an appointment is put a dated, room-ordered list on the table instead of trying to remember the hall from memory.

Then set a repeat. A house changes. Furniture moves, a rug arrives, a bulb goes, a chair gets replaced with a lower one. Walk it again every six months, and again after any hospital stay or any change in how your parent moves around.

Keep the old sheets. Two sheets six months apart show change, and change is the thing professionals most want to see and the thing families most often fail to record.

Questions