Finger Injuries in the Workplace

From our experience, many people sustain finger injuries in work and they can occur from a vast array of situations that are completely unexpected. If you injure your finger whilst at work, you should seek medical help immediately as delays could have a negative long term impact on the recovery of your finger.

The most common place where people suffer finger injuries is in factories. Due to the machinery and the physical demands of people working in factories, this is a primary setting for people to injure their fingers.
At Roger Solicitors, we have dealt with a large number of finger injury cases and have obtained high compensation figures for each client. The main aspect we look for when determining whether you have a case in this scenario is whether the accident could have been prevented by your employer. If your employer provided you with unsafe work equipment such as machinery that has a malfunction and causes you to injure your finger, then you will have a strong case. Other aspects that could also make your employer liable are defective protective work equipment or failure to provide any, carrying out tasks without the appropriate training or working outside the scope of your contracted employment.
Employers owe a duty of care to you as an employee and this includes preventing personal injuries that are reasonably foreseeable. There are a number of pieces of health and safety legislation governing the safety of employees within the workplace and these include identifying foreseeable hazards, supervising the workplace effectively, issuing warning signs for employees and providing the appropriate work equipment and protection. Employees who do not have this but carry on working regardless are not breaching any laws as the onus in on the employer to ensure that you have this equipment.
The most regularly used procedure for claiming factory cut finger compensation is to submit an application for assessment to the Injuries Board. Your application can be completed on a paper form or online, but must be submitted with a medical practitioner´s report with the specifics of your finger injury laid out. Receipts for any expenses you have incurred which are directly attributable to your finger accident at work should also be attached to your application.
From dealing with finger injury cases, we have witnessed first-hand that it is not just the initial injury that accumulates compensation for the client, but also the aftermath. For the majority of finger injuries, even minor injuries can pose to become extremely problematic in the future and have a major impact on the victim’s life. A number of our client’s have had to change careers as they are simply unable to continue working in their field due to a finger injury. In our experience, an injured finger is one of the most devastating injuries a person can sustain from an accident at work.
Since finger injuries predominantly occur within manual jobs, the loss of a finger or even an injury to it can prevent someone from returning to not only their current job but any job that relies heavily on the use of their finger. If this occurs, the value of your case will almost certainly increase as we would then have to obtain what is known as a vocational assessor’s report. The role of a vocational assessor is to determine how the finger injury has impacted your working life and your career prospects and they then provide a final say as to whether you are unfit to continue in the profession you are in. Therefore, if your working experience has been solely in factories or other manual jobs, your finger injury may preclude you from ever entering into employment again in that capacity. It may force you to have to change career paths completely and perhaps obtain further education to enter into a different role. These are the aspects that we at Rogers Solicitors always have in our mind from the moment we speak with a client. Our aim is to obtain the most compensation we can for our client’s. However, as you will be able to see from our blog regarding the Injuries Board process, finger injuries are usually too high value to be settled within this process due to the necessity of obtaining multiple medical reports including a vocational assessors report and a psychologist report. Therefore, the majority of finger injury cases that we deal with will inevitably exit the Injuries Board process and proceed towards Court proceedings. However, the vast majority of cases never enter a court room and typically settle long before a trial date.
Finger injuries can cause a great deal of psychological damage and can impact your day to day life not only physically but mentally. Therefore, most compensation offered to clients towards the early stages of their case will not include their future loss of earnings, change in careers, emotional and psychological distress. These aspects increase the value of a finger injury case greatly.
To provide a quick recap of the matters you should deal with if you suffer an injury to your finger within in the workplace, firstly always seek medical attention. After getting medical treatment, you should fill out an accident report form at your workplace as this will assist us in establishing liability. Finally, if you are able to, photographs of the equipment that injured your finger and the finger injury itself would also be beneficial for your case.

Have your suffered a workplace injury? Please review our accidents at work page for more information.