Accident at work - injury claim options

Employers have a legal duty to ensure that the premises and environment in which staff work are safe. Most work hard to ensure that this is the case, but occasionally, preventable accidents do happen in and around the workplace. Accidents involving machinery, lifting or manual handling have obvious and immediate impacts, such as loss of limbs or fingers and back pain. An employer is responsible for ensuring that machinery is adequately maintained and for ensuring that sufficient training and supervision is given to staff using machinery, hazardous chemicals or taking on other manual roles. Employers are also responsible for ensuring that their staff are safe in other situations. For example, they must ensure that signs are displayed if floors are being cleaned and therefore slippery.

Employees can also suffer from violent attacks by clients or patients. All of these accidents can significantly affect employees’ health and livelihoods, leaving them hospitalised, unable to walk or drive. Most of these situations are a good basis to make an injury claim. Whilst some people may feel uncomfortable in bringing other sorts of compensation cases, deciding to make a work accident claim is often a more clear cut decision. It is often easier to see the economic impact of such an accident. There are a number of specialist personal injury lawyers, which offer services to those wishing to apply for compensation for an injury sustained at work. These will be able to advise employees in this situation of their legal rights and signpost to further sources of support, information and benefits.