The very fact that an employee has suffered a chemical injury at work can be proof that health and safety is compromised in their workplace. In the UK there are both numerous regulations that govern the use, transportation and storage of hazardous chemicals and health and safety legislation framed to protect the health and wellbeing of employees in the workplace. Diligent compliance with all the pertinent legislation, regulations and a complete discharge of their common law duty of care should be sufficient for an employer to be able to confidently state that they had taken all reasonably practicable steps to remove or reduce the risk from known chemical hazards present in the workplace.
When things go wrong and an employee suffers a chemical injury, the chances are that the employer has fallen down in their legal health and safety obligations and duty of care to their employees. At that stage the injured employee is two thirds of the way to being eligible to make a claim for chemical injury compensation. It has been demonstrated that firstly the employer has a duty of care and secondly that the employer had failed discharge that duty of care. All that is left is to show is that it was that failure that caused, or contributed to the employee having, his or her accident.
The health and safety factors that need to be considered when it comes to chemicals are no different to those that are taken into consideration for other types of workplace hazard namely:
• The impact of the hazard – how severe would the impact be?
• How likely is the hazard to occur – would it be a common or rare occurrence?
• How long would workers be exposed to the hazard for?
• How many workers would be exposed?
Once answers to the above questions have been calculated the appropriate action can be taken which will be, in order of desirability:
• Elimination of the hazard
• Substitution of the hazard for a less dangerous one
• Isolation of hazard from the workforce
• Engineering out of the hazard by the addition of equipment and tools to negate it
• Avoidance of the hazard by changing the way that employees work
• Provision of personal protective equipment and specialist health and safety training for employees if the elimination, substitution, isolation, engineering out and avoidance of the hazard all prove to be impracticable.
Thinking of making a claim for a chemical injury at work? Contact us today
There is a very strictly enforced time limit for making any sort of compensation claim. So if you want to know how to claim injury compensation, email us straight away.
- Call 0800 1404544, or
- Complete the enquiry form below.
