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Working in an office may seem like one of the safer choices of career environments; but they are not immune from accidents and consequently injuries. Understandably, it is rare to sustain an injury as serious as one you may sustain on a building site – however, injuries can still occur. So here’s a couple of examples of regulations that apply more directly to office compensation claims.

Slips and Trips

Your employer is under a duty to ensure the working environment is a safe one and therefore trailing wires, open cupboard doors, spillages and piles of paperwork and folders should be managed to ensure they do not cause a tripping or slipping hazard and ensure nobody is injured. That is why on your first day of work you probably have to indulge a lot of paperwork explaining health and safety and what not to do.
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Manual handling involves moving objects or items from one place to another by lifting, pushing, pulling, carrying or lowering. It is not only, as many people think, the fact that something is heavy which necessarily causes injury, but it could arise from the way in which something was moved or handled. This could even occur if an object was relatively light by repeating the movement many times.

What must employers do?

Where it is reasonably practicable, employers should remove the need for their employees to handle objects manually where there is a risk of being injured. This could be achieved by finding mechanical solutions to reduce the need for manual handling by employees.
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The Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations 1992 (or “PUWER” for short) was brought in to ensure that all equipment used in most work environments meets a minimum standard of safety. It also requires that the equipment is safely maintained by employers.

What falls within PUWER?

PUWER has a very wide remit and includes employers which provide equipment for their employees to carry out their work. It includes local councils, businesses and charities. The equipment which falls within the remit is similarly wide in scope. It includes any machinery, appliance, apparatus, or a combination of components which form a common end but work as one. This is an extremely wide list of employers and equipment but it is necessary keep the employers providing equipment in its remit.
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Accidents in warehouses, where forklift trucks are common, are fairly frequent and we deal with quite a large volume of claims for personal injury compensation from employers insurance after an accident at work. When it comes to forklift truck accidents, one of the most common ones is getting your foot run over by a colleague. It can be easily done.

So if you have had your foot run over by a colleague at work because they were not paying attention or were perhaps travelling too fast, what are your rights for making a personal injury compensation claim? Are you covered, and what can you claim for?

You have a good claim

First things first, prospects wise you have a fairly decent chance at winning the claim. If a colleague is negligent and causes an injury to a co-worker, you can make a claim from your employers insurance under the scope of vicarious liability. Vicarious liability simply means that the negligence of a co-worker falls on your employer. So you don’t need to worry about suing your mate at work because your employers insurance will cover you.
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As soon as you start your new job, the duty of care that your employer owes to all of their employees starts immediately. There is no honeymoon period or anything like that – the duty starts from the first second you start working for them. This fact can lead to a lot of accidents at work.

The duty is on your employer to ensure that any task you are requested to do will be able to be carried out in a safe way. So if the task at hand requires you to be trained, your employer is responsible for the training. Let’s look at a few examples:

Manual Handling – if you are instructed to undertake any manual handling activities and your new employer has not yet trained you, if you sustain injury because of the lack of training, you may have a claim for compensation against them.
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Most law firms are now charging up to 25% for you to make a claim for an accident at work. This is due to recent legal fee changes that mean lawyers can no longer recover all of their legal fees from the other side.

Before the changes in April, things were a lot more straight forward – lawyers could recover all legal fees from the other side, so most people get 100% of their payout. But since the changes, the recovery of two things have been abolished. One is called a Success Fee, and the other is called an After The Event insurance premium.

The 25% is normally to cover the success fee – and 25% is common because this is the maximum a lawyer can take from a client for the Success Fee. On top of that, a lot of law firms are also asking for payment of the unrecoverable insurance as well.
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Many people at some time in their life have been around stock cages. Anyone who has worked in retail whilst doing their studies, or as a career, will be used to using them on a daily basis. Most places I have worked at and most people I know who have worked with them all suggest the same thing – they can be fairly dangerous pieces of equipment!

Your employer has an important duty to look after your wellbeing, and they therefore have a duty to ensure that you must adhere to a safe system of work. If an unsafe system of work is adopted, and you are injured as a result, there may be a claim for compensation to answer for. When it comes to dangerously stacked stock cages, it commonly comes down to one of a few scenarios:
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We see many different types of work accidents, from tripping accidents, accidents involving harmful substances, lifting/carrying accidents, accidents involving equipment or machinery etc. If you have sustained injury because there were no guards on a machine which you were using, then at face value it is likely that you have a genuine claim. Machinery should be safe and this means it should be regularly checked and maintained. If a guard has come off of a machine and has not been replaced, it is more dangerous and injury is foreseeable.

Modern machinery often have guards to prevent injury to hands. Indeed even on equipment you use in the garden such as hedge trimmers, there are guards in which your hands should not go beyond. With works machinery, we could be talking about large industrial machines so the potential injury could be very serious. If you catch you hand in a machine, we could be looking at loss of fingers or loss of the hand. The potential injury and potential effect on a victim’s life is significant.
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Construction is one of the biggest industries, employing 2 million people across the UK. Building sites are by nature very dangerous places, and employers have a duty to keep employees safe whilst at work. It can be difficult to control hazards and risks when the work environment is constantly changing, and therefore employees are probably injured on construction sites every single day.

The construction industry accounts for 22% of all fatalities and 10% off all major injuries at work. Accidents commonly caused because of falls from heights, slips, trips and defective equipment.

Employees are commonly injured by:
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A lot of people know their rights when it comes to making a claim for personal injury compensation for an accident at work. But some people are a little unsure about their rights if they work part time. Do you still have the same rights as a part time worker or casual worker?

The short answer is yes – you, as a part time employee of the employer, are still covered by all of the workplace regulations that cover full time employees as well. The regulations are there for anyone who works directly for the employer. Even if you work just one day a week, there is the same duty on your employer to make sure that you are not injured at work. The same duty at work applies.
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