Assessment of safety of playground equipments in elementary schools in Taegu

Park, Jung Han; Yun, Soon Gil

Abstract

To assess the safety of playground equipments in the elementary schools of Taegu, a site visit was made to 117 elementary schools out of 119 schools between 1st and 30th April 1991. Safety criteria were developed on the bases of Massachusetts' Playground Safety Check List, standard height of Korean children of 6-12 years old, and source book for designing playground equipments. There were eleven different kinds of playground equipments installed in 117 schools but the number of equipments was about 50-60% of the minimum requirement set by the Ministry of Education except chin-up bar. Among the installed equipments, 47.3% of swings, 16.6% of parallel bars, 20.0% of monkey bars, and 16.0% of slides were broken down. None of the swings, slides, seesaws, monkey bars, and sandboxes met the safety criteria to the full but 59.0 of chin-up bars, 31.4% of parallel bars, and 13.5% of stumps met the criteria fully. The proportions of equipments that were dangerous for children to play on were 26.4% for slides, 20.0% for monkey bars, 11.6% for seesaws, 10.4% for parallel bars, 9.85 for sandboxes, 7.4% for swings and stumps, and 3.9% for chin-up bars. The rests were either in need of repair of broken down. It was revealed by this survey that the playground equipments were too short in number to meet the minimum requirement, designs and size were not standardized, and many of the equipments were involved with the risk of child accidents. Therefore, a safety standard for the playground equipments should be developed and the existing equipments should be repaired immediately.