Category Archives: Personal injury

Avoiding a burn injury at work

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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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How falls at work happen

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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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Avoiding falls at work

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Is avoiding falls at work a personal responsibility of the employee? Partially it is, because if an employee acts in a reckless or deliberate manner with no regard to his safety or the safety of his colleagues and those actions are partially responsible for the accident and subsequent injury they sustain, any claim for compensation would have to take this, what is termed ‘contributory negligence’ into account, even if the working environment or equipment or machinery or lack of training also played a part in causing the accident. That said, in most personal injury compensation claims the responsibility for the accident is usually borne by the employer.

This weight of responsibility for an accident on the employer reflects the legal duty of care that employers have to ensure as far as possible, that no harm comes to their employees in the course of their employment. Essentially this means, in the case of preventing falls at work, ensuring that the working environment is tidy with no clutter, that floor surfaces are even and present no tripping hazard, that steps and stairs are fitted with secure handrails and guards, that lighting is adequate and that ladders and other machinery and equipment functions correctly and safely. They must also ensure that workers are kitted out with the appropriate personal protective equipment such as safety helmets and harnesses and footwear with non-slip soles.

This attention to making the working environment safe and providing safety equipment will all be for nought however, if the employer fails to adequately train their employers to safely carry out their jobs; to use and maintain their safety equipment appropriately and correctly, to understand the health and safety issues associated with those jobs, including awareness of the hazards they could potentially encounter and to make non-compliance with mandatory health and safety regulations a disciplinary offence where such compliance is included in job descriptions. For instance, a roofer would be trained in the assessing the structural integrity of a roof before placing his weight and that of his equipment upon it and warehouse workers would be made aware of the slip hazards presented by split liquids or grease on the floor, or carrying loads at height or over uneven surfaces.

To summarise; it is the combination of a safe workplace, adequate training and supervision and the personal responsibility of the individual employee that successfully results in the incidence of falls, and other accidents, being greatly reduced at work. Remove any of those ingredients to safe working and the workplace can once more take on the aspect of a hostile environment.

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Common causes of office injuries and accidents

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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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