What Should I Do if I’ve Been Injured at Work?

Ryan Zavodnick | July 5, 2018 | Video

If you’ve been injured at work, there’s a couple of things that are very important to remember to do and we always advise our clients to immediately report your work injury to your employer. One, it’s very important because the law requires that you report your work injury within 120 days to your employer. Two, sometimes people fail to report their work injuries right away and the employers use that as a reason to deny their claims. The reasons that people gave why they don’t report right away: “I thought it was minor, I thought it would go away, I thought it was no big deal” unfortunately those are the types of cases that oftentimes create the biggest problems because it does turn out to be a big deal and because they didn’t report right away a lot of times the employers think they are not being truthful, it didn’t happen at work or it’s something else that caused your injuries so that’s why it’s really important to report right away.

I’ll also suggest where possible, if the employers have a policy of making a written report, make a written report, contact the human resources department and make sure that they document that you were hurt at work, give them the names of all witnesses, if there were any, to the accident. Also its very important to make sure that you document all the injuries you sustained that you know of that’s bothering you and not just the major ones.

Sometimes people will simply report “well, while lifting something, it hurt my back the most” but they also may have hurt their neck in the accident and forget to tell their employer that their neck is also injured and also hurting them because they are just trying to go with the main injury and at times that will come back to become a problem because they will say well you didn’t tell us your neck hurt right away therefore we don’t believe you and we are not going to accept your claim for your neck and pay benefits for that. It’s also important to seek out immediate medical attention. Again, a lot of times people think that they can power through it, I’ve been hurt before, this will go away in just a couple of days and don’t go to the doctor Not doing that is another red flag for the insurance company, they see it as “well, you were not really hurt because you didn’t go to the doctor, you didn’t report your injuries, you didn’t seek out immediate medical attention”.

It’s important to get to the doctor quickly after the accident so that you can let them know what’s bothering you. At worst, you don’t have to follow with them. At best, you do need to go back and you have now established that treatment with the doctor.

I think it’s also important that following work injury, you do contact an experienced workers’ compensation attorney. The benefit of having a workers’ compensation attorney from the start is to make sure that the insurance company, your employer does what they are supposed to do, that they issue the right forms that they document your injury properly that they pay you if they should be paying you wage loss benefits and there’s no harm in hiring an attorney right away because your employer is not allowed to retaliate against you when you do hire workers compensation attorney or bring your workers compensation claim, that is against the law and not permissible.

Contact Our Workers’ Compensation Law Firm in Philadelphia Today To Get Help With Your Case

To learn more and get the help you deserve, call Zavodnick & Lasky Personal Injury Lawyers at (215) 875-7030 or contact us online.
You can also visit our law firm at 123 S Broad St #1220, Philadelphia, PA 19109.