Some of the injuries sustained by victims of workplace falls from great height can be appalling and permanently life changing. Falls from lower heights can also easily result in injuries sufficient to incapacitate for lengthy periods and perhaps leave the victim with an on-going disability. If the victim of such a fall strongly suspects that their accident would not have occurred had their employer not been negligent in their legal duty to ensure that the workplace was safe, then they might be able to bring a claim for personal injury compensation.

Apart from their natural dissatisfaction or even anger about the circumstances of their accident, the workplace fall victim will probably also be coping with recovering from extensive multiple injuries and facing the prospect of the kind of life he or she could not have possibly imagined in their worst nightmares – perhaps confined to a wheelchair and needing constant assistance with even the most basic daily tasks. In such circumstances claiming compensation goes beyond merely being their right, to being their duty to themselves, their family and indeed other workers who might be yet to fall victim to a similar slipshod engagement with health and safety by their employers.

Whether you can claim compensation for you accident or not, is, as indicated above, to do with a question of blame. Analysing the circumstances of your accident and determining who was to blame for it can be a complicated business involving consideration of all the available facts. These facts might be drawn from witness statements, photographic evidence, medical reports, reports from health and safety experts on the condition and fitness for purpose of the equipment you were using and even from the similarity of your accident to those that have occurred in the past for which compensation was awarded.

It’s no game for the inexperienced ‘amateur’ and certainly not for someone struggling to cope with the aftermath of their injuries. That is the reason why specialist work accident solicitors developed – legal professionals whose experience and expert knowledge regarding work related personal injury compensation claims place them in an unrivalled position to be able to advise potential claimants on the viability of their proposed claims and then negotiate the claim to the most successful conclusion possible for their client.

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The presence of chemicals, capable of causing personal injury, is more prevalent and across a wider range of workplaces than most people realise. From chemicals capable of causing varying degrees of occupational contact dermatitis and found in such commonplace goods as adhesives, cleaning materials and beauty and hairdressing products all the way through to chemicals that are capable of killing, serious personal injury or causing acute, long term health conditions with very little exposure and which are encountered mainly in the petro-chemical and other heavy industries.

These hazardous chemicals affect workers most commonly by the following means:

• Direct physical contact with the body, predominantly eyes and hands and usually the combined result of a chemical spillage due to incorrect storage, handling or use and the worker not wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) which would have provided an impermeable barrier, i.e. gloves or goggles.

• Inhalation of the vapours and gases of some chemicals, due to an accidental release of the vapour/gas or the lack of or inadequacy of a hazardous gas extraction system or as a normal part of the work process being undertaken by workers who haven’t been equipped with effective PPE.

• Affecting workers whose physiological constitution renders them more susceptible to the harmful effects than their co-workers who might not show any ill effects at all.

• Low level exposure over a long period of time, the harmful effects of which might not manifest for months or years after the commencement (and indeed ending) of that exposure, as in the case of fertilisers, sheep dip and weed-killers used, or previously used, in the farming industry.

Chemical injuries can thus be seen to be caused mainly by that ‘perfect storm’ of hazardous substance coming into contact with unprotected or/and untrained worker who might perhaps be working in an environment in which the control, containment or other engineering or process mechanisms for hazard elimination or reduction are not or only partially in place. This brings us on to the role of the employer.

If an employer due to his failure to discharge his duty of care to keep his employees safe and his lack of compliance with health and safety legislation is the reason or contributory reason that an employee suffers a chemical injury, then that employee could make a claim for chemical injury compensation. It’s as simple as that; bad employer + employee injured at work can = a valid claim for personal injury compensation.

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The fact that you work in a school rather than in any other type of employment has no adverse effect on your right to claim personal injury compensation if you are the victim of a workplace accident. Your employer has a clearly defined legal duty to ensure both that your school is a safe working environment for all employees and also to ensure, as far as is reasonably practicable your health, safety and welfare whilst you are at work.

If you are unfortunate enough to have an accident at work that you feel wasn’t your fault you need to be able to determine whose fault it actually was. At this point it is well worth considering retaining the services of a specialist work accident solicitor, who will be able to accurately determine who was to blame for your accident and advise you as to whether or not you can bring your claim.

To be able to bring that claim for compensation for the accident you had at your school, the cause of your accident needs to be investigated. If that cause would not have existed if your employer had taken all reasonably practicable steps to eliminate it as they are legally obliged to do and if your accident was clearly a reasonably foreseeable consequence of your employer not taking those steps, then you might well be able to pursue your claim.

A relatively clear cut example of determining the viability of a personal injury compensation claim would be if a school employee broke her ankle falling into a water filled pothole as she supervised a playground. The Head Teacher had long been aware of the poor condition of the playground surface but remedial work had not been carried out. The poor surface constituted hazard and risk to the health and safety of staff and pupils alike.

The Head Teacher or controlling authority for the school has a legal duty to control that risk either by ideally repairing the playground surface or if that wasn’t immediately possible, preventing staff and students accessing it and erecting warning signs. If none of these steps had been taken the controlling authority for the school could have been clearly demonstrated to have been in breach of their legal health and safety obligations and duty of care to staff and students and as an injury was a reasonably foreseeable consequence of this breach, they could be held responsible for the accident.

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Remember, it costs nothing to ask and you receive 100% of your compensation.

Employers are legally obliged to undertake a risk assessment for all the processes within the workplace that present a potential hazard to their workforce. These risk assessments must detail the hazards, the risks to health/wellbeing they represent and the measures to be taken to remove or reduce those risks. The contents of risk assessments and standard operating procedures need to be thoroughly familiar to employees as part of their induction and on-going training. If this process is competently followed through from beginning to end, the risks to employees will be identified and where reasonably practicable, removed or ameliorated. The risks of burn injuries should obviously be covered by the above.

Over and above that, employers have a duty of care to ensure that their employees come to no harm, physically or psychologically as a result of their employment and this duty encompasses the requirement to ensure that all staff are trained to safely use the equipment required to be operated in the course of their work and that that equipment is in good repair and safe to use. Employers must also make sure that their employees are aware of how to maintain a safe working environment and work without danger to themselves or others.

With regard to specifically avoiding burn injuries at work the following steps can be taken:

• Training workers in burn hazard awareness and reduction practices applicable to their workplace and duties.

• Employees remaining alert to burn hazards whilst working.

• Employees avoiding reaching through or over hot surfaces, areas, or corrosive chemicals.

• The use of personal protective equipment (PPE), e.g. gloves, goggles, aprons or overalls.

• Employees not undertaking tasks for which they haven’t been trained or which would place them in danger of being burned.

• Employees realising that steam can burn and some vapours can burn if inhaled.

• Only using correctly maintained and safe electrical equipment.

• Equipment with hot surfaces fitted with guards or warning signs.

• Keeping the workplace tidy so as to avoid slip, trip and fall hazards

If you have experienced a burn injury at your workplace caused by your employer failing to discharge his duty of care to keep you safe at work you might be entitled to claim compensation for your injury.

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Falls from height have consistently been one of the most common causes of injuries sustained in the workplace according to the statistics compiled on year on year by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE). The HSE divide their fall statistics between falls from height that involve steps and stairs and those that don’t but regardless of this statistical differentiation the injuries that result from such falls in totality can range from the immediately fatal through a spectrum to those from which recovery is rapid and complete.

The reasons such falls occur are many and varied and will be investigated below, but fundamentally they usually occur due to employers failing in their legal duty of care to their employees to remove or minimise wherever practical, the likelihood of injury as a result of the working environment and working practices. At one or multiple points along the Planning (safe working practices and procedures), Providing (a safe environment and safety equipment), Training (employees to be aware of health and safety issues and how to correctly use the safety equipment) (PPT) pathway, the employer fails and the employees can pay a heavy price with regard to their wellbeing as a result.

The most common manifestations of an employers’ failure to discharge their duty of care fall into two categories; firstly in an unsafe environment and/or equipment and secondly in a failure to train employees adequately, i.e. to operate machinery or use equipment safely and correctly and/or to be aware of health and safety issues and comply with health and safety regulations pertinent to their jobs. In practical terms this leads to the following circumstances most commonly causing falls.

The following list is not exhaustive but provides a good indication of the variety of situations and environments which directly contribute to falls in the workplace – it makes for depressing reading as these circumstances aren’t historical but currently occurring across the country as you read this. Poor lighting, lack of hand or guardrails on steps, badly assembled scaffolding, excessive weight on scaffolds, working on scaffolds in high winds, using badly maintained or unrepaired ladders, ladders slipping from under users, working on structurally unsound roofs, falling through roofs and skylights, working from height in trees with faulty harnessing or inadequate tree climbing training, a cluttered environment, uneven ground surfaces, wet or greasy floors, cleaning large immobile lorries, ice or snow, lack of training in how to spread body weight and minimise injury in the event of fall, a lack of personal protective equipment.

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You couldn’t be safer than sitting indoors, in the warm, generally not touching anything more lethal than a computer keyboard and telephone – could you? Well as far as workplaces go, probably not, but that doesn’t mean that your office is an intrinsically safe environment, as the thousands of accidents that occur in office environments each year in the UK testify.

Mind you, it should be a safe environment – safe as houses. If you employer has diligently undertaken all their legal obligations to keep you safe there shouldn’t be any risk to your health, safety or welfare left unaddressed. This will have included assessing the risks in your working environment, putting the necessary control measures in place and fully training you and your colleagues in health and safety awareness, including such essentials as fire safety and manual handling and lifting and empowering you to be pro-active in keeping your office safe and how to avoid occupational illnesses and injuries.

If you have an employer who has been negligent in carrying out their legal duty of care towards you, many risks that you might not have even been aware of could exist in your seemingly safe environment and might lead to some of the following unfortunately relatively common accidents occurring:

• Slips and trips due to hazards such as cables running across floors and corridors, worn carpeting, unnecessarily slippery floor coverings, spillages not cleaned up quickly, items left in the middle of floor spaces, lack of desk storage allowing items to fall into the floor.

• Falls from standing on furniture (tables and chairs) rather than a step ladder to reach high places or inadequate lighting on stairs.

• Musculoskeletal injuries from attempting to carry, lift, push or pull objects without the appropriate manual handling training.

• Burns and other injuries from electrocution due to using electrical equipment that is faulty or which hasn’t been annually portable appliance (PAT) tested.

• Contamination from asbestos due to incorrectly carried out repair or maintenance to the building you work in.

• Asphyxiation from carbon monoxide poisoning due to faulty central heating boilers

• Injuries due to working with common office machines with partially exposed moving or very hot parts such as shredders, photocopiers, binding machines and laminators, without training and awareness of the risks such as catching hair, clothing or jewellery.

That’s quite a list for a cosy, safe office and needless to say some of the injuries suffered can be appalling and life changing and a few can be fatal. Health and safety is the key to making sure that a bad day at the office doesn’t suddenly get much, much worse.

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Injured at work in the office? One of our specialist personal injury solicitors can explain to you all about claiming injury compensation.

To arrange a FREE discussion with one of our personal injury team call us on FREEPHONE FREEPHONE 0800 1404544 e-mail our team at advice@the-personal-injury-solicitors.co.uk