Playgrounds are fun places where a child learns and develops creativity, cognitive skills, social ability, and health benefits. Thus, the government of Australia ensures a safe environment at the playgrounds.
In 2004 Playground Safety Standards were introduced to optimize safety and reduce risks involved while playing in a playground. In this article, we’ve briefly discussed old and new playgrounds and the importance of playground safety standards.
It is challenging for companies to create an inspiring and unstructured play area that provides a safe zone in the children’s playground. Better planning by anticipating the risks at the design stage could do the children no harm. Thus, following these safety guidelines are crucial for companies during designing, installing, maintaining, and operating the play area.
Playground Parts is a reputable company in Australia that manufactures and supplies parts for any kind of play equipment. They offer high-quality spare parts, fasteners, components, and play products online for a non-standard playground. Also, they provide a wide range of swing seats, slides, play equipment, and tools required to build a playground at a fair cost. You can visit their UPLOAD page to request any parts you choose to buy.
New vs Old Playgrounds
The playgrounds of the 80’s and 90’s were much different from what we see nowadays. The old types of playgrounds bring a nostalgic feel to our minds, but they lack many safety features. However, most new playgrounds are designed keeping safety measures in mind.
Risks And Hazards Of Old Playground
In the old playgrounds, safety is not a major concern. Cuts, bumps, scrapes, and burns are quite common among children playing every day. Generally, these risks are because of steel slides, broken handles of see-saw, full speed merry-go-round, high monkey bars, circular swings with unsafe witch’s hat, unsupervised play equipment and many more.
Playground Safety Standards
The concept of continuous play structure came from the USA. Now it has been introduced in Australia, as there is a push for public litigation regarding injuries. This new concept offers an independent play structure for children that includes equipment such as jungle gyms, trapeze bars, monkey bars, spinners, swing sets, witches ‘hats, and traditional see-saw plank. Also, this provides similar safety standards in school parks, councils, child care centers, and other places where children gather.
Continuous play structure not only reduced the risks and hazards, but also became less fun, challenging, and monotonous for children. It also became uninteresting among influencing people such as Local Councils and parents, resulting in reduced funds to the government.
Some dangers included:
- Steel slides were usually installed, which became too hot during the summer, increasing the risks of burns.
- Unsupervised play equipment such as two or more children sliding down with no guard rails on the slide.
- Parents or guardians never checked for loose screws and broken equipment.
- No concept of soft fall, and many more
A Better playground design
To overcome the dangers, there was a need to design adventurous playgrounds using exciting and challenging play equipment. As a result, a wide variety of high-quality play products came into the limelight from local manufacturers like playground parts.
As playground safety standards make sure that better equipment is designed, manufactured, supplied, and operated without any harm.
