Can I claim compensation for a fall at work?

Yes, you can, so long as you or the specialist personal injury solicitor you instruct, are able to demonstrate that:

1) You were owed a duty of care

2) That duty of care was breached

3) That breach was the cause of you suffering your injury.

That all sounds simple enough doesn’t it? But what does it all really mean and how easy is it to be able to place a big fat tick against all three requirements? Firstly it is essential to realise that your employer has a duty of care, under the law, towards you, which essentially means that they must have taken every reasonable step possible to ensure that you don’t get injured or suffer anything that has a negative effect on your well being as a result of your work. The health and safety legislation and your employer’s common law duty of care are non-negotiable and so we can confidently put our tick against number one.

How to claim compensation for a fall at work

If it can be shown that your employer breached that duty of care, you will be able to place a tick against the second requirement. Your employer’s responsibilities covered under his duty of care and other legal obligations towards you are extensive but a breach might include:

• Failing to ensure a safe working environment

• Failure to ensure that staff don’t work excessive hours

• Failure to undertake risk assessments

• Failure to provide job specific training

• Failure to provide health and safety training including on personal protective equipment.

Finally, you or your solicitor must able to demonstrate that there is a causal connection between you suffering your injury and your employer’s breach of his duty of care or other legal health and safety obligations towards you, e.g. that the breach caused or contributed to your injury. Some concise examples might be an employer’s failure to install or keep in good repair a handrail down a dimly lit steep flight of steps which resulted in an employee losing their footing in the dark conditions and having nothing to hold onto to prevent them falling or an employer failing to adequately train someone in rope and harness use before sending them up a tall tree to prune it resulting in the employee falling from the tree.

Establishing the connection between the breach of duty of care and you suffering an industrial injury at work might not be as straightforward as it first appears and that is where the expertise of a specialist work accident solicitor is invaluable. Such a lawyer will rapidly be able to determine if there was a breach and if it did indeed contribute towards or cause you to have your accident – the essential prerequisites for any work accident compensation claim.

Want to claim compensation for a fall at work?

If you have suffered a fall at work which was not your fault, you could be entitled to injury compensation. If you have a question about how to claim compensation for a work injury, call our specialist injury solicitors today.

Don’t delay making your claim – because there is a strict three year time limit, and leaving your claim too late could lose you your right to compensation entirely.