It’s never good news if you hurt yourself while on the job. If you work in certain professions, though, your injury chances automatically go up. For example, if you work in construction, job-related injuries happen often. If you hurt yourself while on the job, you need to determine whether you can get compensation. You can in most instances. You’ll need that money. You might require it for things like medical bills. You should also know about common mistakes workers make after a job injury that make getting the full possible compensation amount difficult. In some cases, you might even make an error and get no compensation at all. We’ll run through how employees hurt their chances of getting compensation after workplace injuries in the following article.
Missing Deadlines to File Paperwork
First, it’s important to understand where the financial compensation for an employee comes from if they hurt themselves while on the job. Usually, their employer will have worker’s compensation insurance.
In almost all instances, a company must legally have this kind of insurance for these types of situations. There’s usually a minimum coverage amount that the employer must have.
This insurance should kick in and pay for all or most of an employee’s salary while they recover following a workplace injury. However, if the employee does not act in certain ways, they will not get that money, or not all of it, depending on how they behaved.
If an employee hurts themselves while on the job, they will more than likely have deadlines for when they must file a claim with their place of employment’s worker’s comp insurance company. If they don’t file the paperwork within a certain set time, they may get nothing.
Not Cooperating with the Claims Process
After a workplace injury, the injured party must always cooperate with the claims process. When they start a claim, they will learn certain ways they must behave and things they must do in order to get their money.
For instance, they may have to see a doctor that the insurance company approves. The insurance company may require that the doctor send them paperwork indicating the nature of the injury and its severity.
If the injured person doesn’t want to see a doctor, and instead they refuse treatment, they can’t get any money. They will still need to recover from the injury, but they will not have any insurance payments coming in to offset the cost of their lost wages while they’re at home for days, weeks, or even months.
Not Following Company Safety Protocols
If a worker tries to approach the insurance company that gives their employer worker’s comp insurance, and they attempt to get money from them, they must sometimes demonstrate that they didn’t cause their injury through horseplay or some other kind of dangerous behavior. Often, these insurance policies have clauses in them that state if the injured party did something reckless or foolish, and that caused their injury, then they can get nothing.
This makes sense, if you think about it. An insurance company shouldn’t have to pay money to compensate someone if their own irresponsible behavior while on the job injured them.
For example, maybe a forklift operator drank several beers during their lunch hour and then went back to the job. They then injured themselves because of their intoxication. The insurance company should not have pay them money to make up their wages.
Every insurance company that provides worker’s compensation has its own rules about that kind of thing. In general, though, an employee who injures themselves through their own irresponsible behavior can’t collect any money for it, especially if several witnesses saw them act in that fashion.
Not Seeking Proper Medical Treatment
If a worker injures themselves while on the job, and they do not seek the proper medical treatment either directly or soon after the injury, then they probably can’t collect money via their company’s worker’s compensation insurance. Usually, if the worker realizes that they hurt themselves, then they would want to seek medical treatment right there on site, if there’s a first aid kit available. If such a thing can’t help them with this particular injury, then they might call an ambulance and get to a hospital.
Many times, a company that offers worker’s compensation insurance will want plenty of paperwork that establishes the claimant’s injuries. If this employee went right to the hospital and got treatment, then the doctor or hospital should have lots of notes and medical test results that establish the injury and its severity.
The worker can use all that documentation when filing their claim. Seeking medical treatment immediately after a work-related accident always makes sense for that reason.
Not Reporting the Injury Promptly to an Employer
One additional omission sometimes costs a worker the money they could get via worker’s compensation insurance. The worker might not approach their boss or supervisor at work when they hurt themselves to tell them about it.
If the worker keeps the injury to themselves, and they tell no one about it, then proving the workplace connection becomes more difficult later. If an employee claims days or weeks later that they hurt themselves at work, but they never told their boss or any other coworkers, then they probably can’t get any money.
That might seem harsh, but the insurance company must always watch for fraud. If they can’t confirm with the worker’s boss that they did, in fact, hurt themselves while on the job, then they may suspect the employee hurt themselves on their own time, but they still want an easy payout while they sit at home recovering.
If a worker doesn’t conduct themselves in the proper way and work within the insurance company’s rules, then they likely can’t get any money, or not as much. That’s why workers need to follow a circumscribed set of behaviors if they want to get compensation through one of these insurance policies.
