What You Need to Do When You Get Injured in an Accident at Your Ohio Workplace?

Injury risks at work include slips and trips, defective equipment, electric shocks, burns, falling objects, toxic exposures, and physical assaults. Depending on their job duties, workers can also face dangers from traffic accidents and animal attacks. No matter how an Ohio workplace accident occurs, the injured employee should do the following things in roughly the order presented.

Seek Medical Attention

Nothing matters more than your health and well-being. Even scrapes can become infected, and the worst symptoms of a concussion may not manifest until hours after a fall or blow to the head. Get checked out after an accident in the workplace results in any type of injury even if you never intend to take medical leave or file a claim for workers’ compensation benefits.

Keep All the Paperwork Related to Your Care

File away each piece of paper you receive from a doctor, nurse, pharmacist, and therapist. Your health insurance provider and your employer’s human resources department will ask for some of this documentation, so it helps to be over prepared to respond to such requests.

The paperwork related to your treatment for a work-related injury may also prove essential to substantiating benefits claims.

Comply With Doctors’ Orders and Keep Therapy Appointments

Sticking with your treatment plan gives you the best chance for making a full recovery.

File an Incident or Accident Report

Do this as soon as your health and circumstance permit. Reporting an injury to your employer gives the organization a legal duty to investigate the incident. The information collected can be used to support workers’ comp or personal injury claims, and the findings should be used to improve workplace safety for everyone.

Be aware that an injured employee has legal rights to report unsafe working conditions and to ask co-workers and managers what they witnessed. An employer who retaliates against a worker who exercises these rights by bullying, fining, demoting, or firing him or her can be sued under a range of whistleblower and civil rights laws.

Consider Filing a Workers’ Compensation Claim

Ohio workers’ comp is generally available when recovering from an injury caused by a workplace accident takes more than three days. The benefits can cover medical expenses, lost wages, partial long-term disability, and other economic losses.

Claims do not get approved automatically, however. Partnering with a knowledgeable and experienced workers’ compensation attorney in Columbus, Ohio, will help an injured employee resolve questions regarding how the accident happened, the severity of the injury, and the need for a lengthy recovery.

Explore Options for Filing a Personal Injury Claim

Even though Ohio makes it nearly impossible for an injured worker to sue his or her employer following a workplace accident, grounds may exist for submitting a personal injury claim against the maker of defective equipment, a negligent driver, or another company whose employee caused an accident. Such a third-party personal injury claim would be pursued separately from a workers’ comp claim, but much of the same evidence would be used in both cases.

If you or a family member suffered a serious injury in an Ohio workplace accident, consider reaching out to a workplace injury attorney at the Columbus offices of Agee Clymer Mitchell & Portman. We offer free consultations, and we can visit clients whose health or financial situation makes coming in to see us impractical. Schedule an appointment online or give us a call at (614) 221-3318 or (800) 678-3318.