by Sharon Jones
Suffering injury or illness in the workplace can be an extremely difficult experience to get through. You head to work each day in order to provide yourself with a better quality of life. You don’t expect to come home feeling worse for wear and experiencing issues that you wouldn’t have otherwise experienced! So, it’s extremely important that you know how to deal with workplace injury and illness in order to make recovery and the process of getting back into work as seamless as possible. Here are just a few pieces of advice that you could follow in order to achieve this!
Seek Professional Medical Help Immediately
When people experience an injury or illness as a direct result of their job or spending time in the workplace, they often try to sweep the problem under the carpet and carry on with work. They are reluctant to raise issue or request time off, as they worry that their employer may think that they are causing an unnecessary fuss or that they are taking excessive time off. But you need to make sure that you do seek professional medical help and that you do take any medically recommended time off to recover properly, no matter how seemingly “small” or “trivial” your issue may be. If you attempt to carry on working regardless of your situation, you can aggravate existing injuries or conditions and cause them to become significantly worse. While you may have been able to recover within a matter of days in the first place, you may find yourself having to take time off work to attend appointments and undergo more major treatment if you leave your condition to deteriorate. What’s more? If you do attend work regardless, the quality of work that you carry out will be lower regardless as a direct result of your condition. You should instead allow yourself time to be well and then perform to the best of your ability when you do return to work.
Take Proper Legal Action
If the injury or illness that you have suffered from is a direct result of negligence or malpractice in the workplace and was not your fault, you also need to take proper legal action. Again, this is something that most people are reluctant to do for fear of angering their employer. But you need to remember that you are working for them and generating profit for them on a daily basis. You are quite literally making their dreams a reality and they are earning more money from you than they are paying you. They consequently take on a set of responsibilities and have to answer to your needs and, most importantly, your health and safety while you are working for them. If they have failed to do so, you are well in your rights to file a personal injury claim against them. This claim will never get to court if your employer has done everything they should have done, so you don’t need to worry about “wronging” or “taking advantage” of your employer. Instead, you are simply pulling them up on their poor behavior. Any money that you take away could be used to cover medical costs that you wouldn’t have incurred if it wasn’t for your employer’s lack of responsibility. It could also be used to replace lost earnings from time taken off to recover. Taking proper legal action will also ensure that your employer amends their wrongs and that you don’t have to worry about returning to a workplace where the same thing will happen again.
Heading Back to Work
It may be daunting to head back to work after experiencing an injury or illness, but it’s important that you do so as soon as you are fit and able to. One thing that tends to concern people about heading back to work is that they feel awkward after having filed a claim against their employer. They worry that they will be treated differently or penalized. But this really shouldn’t be the case. You have legal rights protecting you and if an employer tries to dismiss you for making a claim against them, you could charge them further with unfair dismissal. If they treat you in a negative way that forces you to resign, you could charge them for constructive dismissal. So, if you do find that you are made to feel uncomfortable or unwelcome when returning to work, or if you feel that things are being made difficult for you in any other way, you should, again, seek legal help.
Hopefully, you won’t ever have to deal with workplace injury or illness. The majority of us will pass through our time at work problem-free. But if you do experience any of these situations, hopefully, the above advice will help you to get back to work as problem free as possible!