business advice
BUSINESS WOMEN SCOTLAND 21
ask the expert
SIMPSON & MARWICK • Tel:+44 (0)141 353 8667 • 144 West George Street, Glasgow, G2 2HG, DX GW377
Lynne Macfarlane is a partner at Simpson & Marwick, and specialises in personal
injury claims. Email Lynne with your accident procedure queries and she will
answer in following issues of BWS magazine. e: [email protected]
Personal injury claims in
the workplace
As a lawyer with over 15 years
experience defending personal
injury claims, I have dealt with
a huge variety of businesses
facing broadly the same set of
circumstances - an employee
has sustained injury, and a civil
claim has been intimated. As an
employer, the effectiveness of your
accident procedures is crucial to
me in identifying whether a claim
is capable of being defended in
court: as a bare minimum, an
accident report ought to have been
prepared, identifying the person
injured and the date of accident,
how the injury occurred and to
whom the injury was reported.
Written signed statements from
witnesses and photographs of
the accident location obtained at
the time of the accident are also
extremely helpful. A quick referral
to your employers’ liability insurer
is the next step and enables
further detailed investigation to
take place, long before the claim
gets anywhere near the court.
huge, with decision makers spending hours in meetings discussing
litigation when they could be more usefully and profitably employed
doing their jobs.
And what about reputation? In larger businesses, word soon
spreads that a colleague has been successful with a claim, with
the consequence that a “claims culture” emerges. A poor record of
work related accidents can have a direct effect on winning business
- when bidding for contracts, it is now common place to be asked
to provide details about numbers of work related accidents, civil
claims and criminal prosecutions.
In my view, prevention of work place accidents must be the starting
point for any successful business. The difficulty is the duties placed
upon employers are myriad - an exhaustive list goes well beyond the
scope of this editorial. If I were to author a book entitled “Dummies’
Guide to Preventing Workplace Accidents”, these would be the broad
chapter headings.
For some businesses, interest in
matters quickly dwindles thereafter –
there isn’t the manpower to assist with
further investigation and production