Transcript – Assessing and Remediating Health and Safety Issues in Children’s Play Spaces in Resort Settings

Hi, my name is Jay Maddock. I’m a professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health and Safety at the School of Public Health. My co-authors in the study, or Courtney from Park Raconteur’s, I’m in the College of Ag and John Spangler from Health Promotion, also in the School of Public Health. Our title of our project is called Assessing Remediating Health and Safety Issues in Children’s Play Spaces and Resort Settings. This project brought together expertise in health and the built environment, tourism, health and hospitality and legal issues in sports, recreation and play. Our initial goal was to recruit resorts, conduct a comprehensive assessment of health and safety of participants, and interview guests and the perceived health and safety at resorts. We found out pretty quickly were reluctant to allow us to talk to their patrons about health and safety issues, feeling that would degrade their experience. So, we modified the study design to develop an audit tool to measure areas where there was concern about health and safety in these outdoor environments. This resulted in the development of the comfort measure, comfort operation and maintenance facilities with outdoor recreation teams. We sent two observers to six resorts from Florida to Texas to audit the environments, everything from slippery pool next to firepit areas that were adjacent to play areas. We catalog these we looked at in greater reliability and we were able to greatly refine the tool as we work through this. Our next step is to conduct a dolphin study with experts to further refine the tool and then search for funding on thermal comfort and safety in these hospitality and recreation settings. We believe this audit tool will be beneficial to managers of hospitality venues as well as Parks and Recreation managers. Thank you.