Keeping your bathroom safe is one of the most important ways to protect your family. Dangers lurk everywhere in this room. Wet floors cause dangerous falls, unlocked medicine cabinets pose poison hazards to children and excessively hot water scalds skin.

Bathroom safety is important at any age, but especially if young children or aging parents live in your home. Fortunately, you can dramatically improve bathroom safety by following a few easy-to-implement steps.

Here are five ideas that can increase bathroom safety for your entire family:

1. Use nonskid bath mats or strips. Whenever water pools on a floor surface, a potentially life-threatening hazard is born. Place textured mats or strips in tubs and showers to reduce floor slickness and lessen the risk of dangerous falls. Also affix these strips on surfaces surrounding the tub or shower, since these areas often get wet.
   
   Mats and strips make falls less likely, but you should also immediately dry off any bathroom surface that becomes wet. Because floors can get wet despite your best efforts, it's important to use rugs that have rubber backing which are less likely to slip when the floor beneath them becomes wet.
   
   
2. Keep electrical appliances away from water. Today, most bathrooms have ground fault protection electrical outlets. These safeguards sense when current flows to the ground and instantly shut off the power, dramatically reducing the risk of electrocution when a plugged-in appliance falls into water.
   
   Nonetheless, this type of outlet does not eliminate all risk. Therefore, it's important to keep hairdryers, curling irons and other electrical devices unplugged around standing water.