If your personal injury was the result of an accident for which you weren’t to blame, you are on well on your way to being able to make a claim for compensation. If, additionally, your accident occurred because your employer failed to ensure as far as is reasonably practicable your health, safety and welfare at the riding establishment or livery stables where you work, it will probably only take a short time for a specialist personal injury claims solicitor to determine the connection between your accident and your employer’s failure to discharge her legal duty of care to you. If that connection is there then your claim can usually go ahead.

Although equine businesses are sometimes not structured like ‘normal’ workplaces and are often run by families and friends and have employees carrying out similar tasks to those family, friends or the customers paying to hire horses or livery their horses, the owner or employer has a duty of care to all of them, employees and non-employees alike. You do not therefore need to have been an employee when you suffered your injury to be able to make your claim although the duty of care to an employee entails a greater extent of responsibilities than does the duty of care to a non-employee. In the former instance health, safety and welfare of individuals have to be taken into account, in the latter only the health and safety of non-employees. Usually, in the case of a workplace accident and claim for compensation this differentiation will have no bearing on the validity of the claim.

A straight forward example of an employer’s failure to discharge their duty of care towards an employee in their stables would have been to neglect to warn that employee that horses are unpredictable and nervous animals who possess a dangerously powerful and long reaching kick and as a result of that lack of training, the employee sustained a serious injury due to being kicked. Another straightforward example of an employer’s failure to discharge their duty of care would be a failure to supply adequate protective equipment, such as a hard hat and body protector to an employee expected to exercise horses by riding them and due to the lack of equipment that employee sustained a serious head injury when she/he fell from their horse.

Making an Equine Injury Claim

If you would like our expert Personal Injury Solicitors on your side, just email us on advice@the-personal-injury-solicitors.co.uk or call us on FREEPHONE FREEPHONE 0800 1404544 today and we will contact you very soon.