Tips for Employers How to Respond to Workplace Injuries

Even with all the steps of percussion, it is inevitable that someone might get injured in your workplace. Here, we are talking about things like slip, trip, and fall injuries that you can never prevent 100 percent. Vehicle accidents that are completely unpredictable but also repetitive motion injuries and machine entanglements that are simply hazards of this particular workplace. Of course, this is far from all that can occur in these circumstances but it is definitely something that has the greatest chance of occurring. This being said, as an employer, you need to know how to react in these situations. Here are several pointers.

Make sure everyone’s ok

As soon as an injury occurs, the first thing you need to do is make sure everyone’s ok. Make sure that you have a well-stocked first aid kit at the office and keep it at the place where it will be the most accessible. You might also want to regularly inspect your first aid kit, seeing how some of the medical supplies inside have an expiry date. Finally, you want the injured person to be examined by an expert, seeing how there are some injuries that aren’t visible right away.

Imagine a scenario where someone has undergone a concussion, has an internal bleeding or has a broken bone they still hadn’t identified and you made them go back to work. Not a good thing for either your reputation as an employer or your prospects at court. Keep in mind that in a moment of crisis, you must act as a human being first and as an employer second.

File a report

Once the crisis at work has been taken care of and your employee has received a necessary medical attention, it is time for you to file a report to the insurance company. In most cases, we are talking about the First Report of Injury or Illness and it is vital that you do this as soon as possible. Furthermore, you should get the place of an injury examined, talk to eyewitnesses and get their statements on what actually happened. In other words, at this point, you need to assume the worse and expect that this might end up in court. Therefore, you need to gather every piece of information you might find useful later on.

Consult legal experts

Another thing you need to consider, when it comes to the prospect of a potential work injury lawsuit, is contacting legal aid. In the introduction, we went to length to discuss just how common some of the minor injuries are but the major ones are not less likely to happen either. This is why every respectable business owner needs to have a qualified work injury lawyer or a company on a speed-dial.

Seeing how this particular area of your work isn’t the only one you will need some help at, you might want to look for a company offering a wide variety of these services. For instance, experts behind Withstand Lawyers Sydney, are specializing in everything from will and disputes, immigration laws to the above-discussed workplace injury compensation claims.

Work towards future prevention

Finally, every workplace injury that happens on your watch needs to serve as a warning sign. This time someone slipped and hurt themselves, tomorrow the outcome might be more serious. What you can do about this is screen your employees for their awareness of the safety policies of your company and educate everyone on the most common workplace injuries.

Aside from this, you should also allocate a significant portion of your resources for the improvement of your workplace safety policies and regularly look for any irregularities. In most cases, resolving a potentially hazardous situation right away also requires less of an investment than trying to fix a situation it has caused. This being said, establishing a safe and healthy workplace is not only a humane thing to do but also a smart business move.

At the end of the day, keep in mind that handling these situations properly has several other advantages that a lot of people tend to neglect. Sure, you can trick your employee out of their compensation and use a legal excuse to pay them less than they believe they deserve, however, where does this get you in the long run? Not only will this completely ruin your talent attraction and retention process but also make you highly unpopular even amongst that fraction of your staff that stays with you. To make the long story short, you need to be as responsible when it comes to your workplace injuries as you are when running your business.