5 Steps for Handling a Workplace Injury

It might seem like every company’s worst nightmare but the simple fact is accidents are unavoidable. You need to do your best to ensure they do not happen but we cannot control everything all the time so workplace accidents do still happen from time to time, despite all our best efforts to prevent them. If you don’t know what to do after a workplace injury then simply follow these 5 steps below:

1. Assess The Situation

Your first reaction should be to assess the situation at hand. Establish the severity of the injury and call an ambulance if necessary. Make sure to clear out the area, especially if it not safe to be there anymore.

Try and figure out what caused the injury and evacuate the rest of your staff, if necessary, to prevent further other employees from being injured. You need to try and remain as calm as possible during this entire process. Your attorney will need all of the evidence and you can only gather that if you are calm and collected.

Get The Employee To A Safe Place

Your next step, if possible, is to move the injured employee to a safe place like a sick bay. If your employee has back or neck injuries then avoid moving them unless you have to, i.e. their life is in danger if you don’t move them. If the injury only involves minor scrapes or cuts then all that would be required is some first aid.

If your employee is more severely injured then make sure your first aider on duty stabilizes the injured employee before moving them to a safe place.

Seek Medical Attention

Once you have moved the employee you can then move onto getting them the proper medical attention they need. By this stage, the ambulance should have arrived or at the most, it should only be a few minutes away.

In the meantime keep the injured employee under a spaceblanket. Once the paramedics have arrived you can hand the medical care over to them.

Gather Information/Evidence

Now that the injured party is being taken care of by the first responders you can move on to gathering information and/or evidence on the accident. You need to establish why the accident happened; your business insurance company will require this information. At this stage, you need to realize that until a full accident/incident investigation has taken place, you cannot know what transpired so try to not make assumptions based solely on your opinion. It’s best to consult a work injury lawyer, as they will know how to best handle your case.

Be Prepared

Once the injured employee has been helped and you’ve gathered all the evidence that you can like CCTV footage, safety checklists, and maintenance schedules, you can now move on to putting together a policy to prevent those types of injuries from reoccurring as much as possible.

Sometimes accidents do just happen, machinery fails even when it’s recently been serviced or employees forget to do their safety checks, etc., all you can do is make sure that your company has done what it can to prevent those kinds of injuries from happening again.

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