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If you need gloves to be able to do your job without injuring your hands, your employer has a duty to provide them to you. To quote Regulation 4 of the Personal Protective Equipment at Work Regulations 1992:

4.—(1) Every employer shall ensure that suitable personal protective equipment is provided to his employees who may be exposed to a risk to their health or safety while at work except where and to the extent that such risk has been adequately controlled by other means which are equally or more effective (source).

The law is clear – if there is a risk that your hands could be injured during the course of your employment, your employer should provide you with appropriate equipment to protect you from a risk. Let’s say you handle hot materials or chemicals – you need heat retardant or chemical proof gloves to prevent any potential injuries. The gloves have to be good enough for the job as well. Regulation 6 states the following:
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Today is a Friday – so most of the country (I imagine) is waiting for 5’o-clock to hit so they can escape the workplace and wind down after a week of working hard. Obviously we’re not – we’re open until 10pm tonight and 9am – 5pm over the weekend (and on the bank holiday) because we’re a little crazy and like to be as accessible as possible to our clients!

But the point I’m making is that the last thing anyone expects is to be going about their daily working business and suddenly slip over and injure themselves at work.
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There are numerous workplace regulations that employers must abide by. They are important, and they are there to prevent employees from being injured in the workplace. An employer must do all they reasonably can to prevent an employee from slipping, tripping, or falling in the workplace. This is covered by the Workplace Health Safety and Welfare Regulations 1992.

These important regulations stipulate that all traffic routes in the workplace should be free of any articles or substances that could cause a slip, trip, or fall accident. So liquid should not be allowed to accumulate on the floor, and items such as boxes should be allowed to be left on the floor either. Employers should have inspection and maintenance regimes that can prevent as much as possible something from becoming a hazard on the floor. Policies should be in place to train and instruct employees not to inadvertently create a hazard by, for example, leaving boxes in a traffic route in a warehouse.
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Ladders can be naturally dangerous pieces of equipment. It’s therefore important to use the right ladders for the right job, and it’s important to make sure that ladders are well maintained and replaced when necessary. At work, this duty is directly the responsibility of your employer.
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There is a duty on your employer under the workplace regulations to make sure that all traffic routes in the workplace are free from hazards. Loose cables are an obvious hazard and they should never be allowed to accumulate onto work traffic routes. Common sense dictates that they should be tidied using ties or placed in an area whereby they are not going to cause a tripping hazard.

So if you are at work and you are injured due to tripping over cables, do you have a claim for compensation?

Well as I said earlier, there is a duty on your employers to make sure traffic routes are free from hazards. But whether you have a claim could depend on how the cables have been allowed to become a hazard.
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A lot of people use specialist equipment at work to help them do their jobs as efficiently as they can. For the topic of this article I’m going to focus on those of us that use equipment like cranes, or hand tools as opposed to us office folk who rely upon the trust stapler and pen.

What happens when you are at work and you are injured by faulty equipment? Can you make a claim for compensation?

The responsibility of all work equipment lies with your employer. So if something goes wrong with it, it is your employer’s responsibility. In fact, there are regulations that say that an employer can be strictly liable for faulty work equipment. What this means is that if you are injured because work equipment becomes faulty, even if there was absolutely nothing your employer could have done to prevent it, they may still be liable.
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For employers, adhering to manual handling regulations is one of the most important things they need to get right. It is so easy to injure your back by using poor lifting techniques or because routes and lifts are not properly risk assessed by employers. There is a significant duty on employers to make sure that their employees are adequate trained and the lifting exercise is risk assessed to take in to account the weight and size of the load, the amount of people needed to assist, the use of mechanical assistance, and the safety of the journey (to name a few common factors!)

As a law firm specialising in accident at work claims, I can tell you that despite the strict rules and regulations in place, employers are still cutting corners and getting it wrong. If you’re reading this I assume it’s because you have injured yourself at work due to manual handling. For the purposes of this blog, I’m going to go in to manual handling alone.

So, as I said earlier, your employer has a duty to risk assess any manual handling activity. If you are going to be instructed to lift something on your own, your employer needs to be confident that:
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There are a lot of rules and regulations that employers must abide by when it comes to preventing accidents at work. It can depend on the type of industry of course – you’d expect less accidents in an office than on a construction site – but all employers are equally responsible for complying with the law.

To comply with the law, one of the most important tools of course is training. It is your employers direct responsibility to make sure that you receive proper and adequate training when it comes to anything health and safety related. If there is something in the workplace that could cause you harm, you need training to make sure you don’t end up injured.

If you feel you have not been trained properly and this has caused you an injury, you may have a claim for compensation. Here are a few examples of the sorts of training you should expect:

Manual Handling Training

If you need to do any lifting in the workplace, your employer must properly train you how to lift safely. This is a form of training that should be refreshed on a regular basis as well; perhaps annually. Any manual handling activity at work should be risk assessed, so training needs should be identified by your employer. If you have been injured due to a lack of, or inadequate, manual handling training, you may have a work injury compensation claim.
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Personal Protective Equipment (or PPE for short) is essential in many occupations. Any equipment or clothing you need to keep you safe in the workplace is covered by specific regulations relating to the Provision and Use of Work Equipment. Such equipment can range from gloves to prevent contact with irritant chemicals in a kitchen, to hard hats on a building site, or to breathing apparatus for dealing with asbestos.

One example of where PPE is very important is when it comes to knees. A great deal of professions involve getting down to low heights and small spaces; so kneeling on hard floors may be a common thing for you. Plumbers do it to get beneath sinks; carpet fitters do it to lay the carpets; anyone who needs to work at low heights is likely to do the obvious thing and kneel on the floor. But is that safe?

Most people probably don’t consider the damage that can be done to your knees by kneeling down for extended periods of time. By kneeling down and working in crouched positions, trauma can be caused to the knee joint over and over again, which in turn causes injuries like cartilage wear and tear, build up of fluids, or common conditions like beat knee (or carpet layer’s knee, coal miner’s knee, or housemaid’s knee as is it also known as). The trauma that can be caused by repeatedly staying down on your knees on a hard surface can be significant.
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Supermarkets can be like obstacle courses sometimes – what with cages, boxes and staff everywhere you turn! So what happens if one of these obstacles unfortunately causes you to have a nasty fall and consequently injure yourself? The answer – you are entitled to claim for compensation!

I am not going to pretend that these are the easiest cases we deal with here at The Injury Lawyers, as that simply would not be true. These cases come under something called the Occupier’s liability Act which means that the occupier of any premises has to ensure that the area is safe for lawful visitors. Leaving boxes hanging around in the aisles certainly does not appear to adhere to this principle.
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