When Can I Demand for Compensation for Injuries Due to Slips and Trips?
Usually when people slip or trip, they just stand up and laugh their accident away. Unfortunately, not all cases of slips and trips can be dispensed with or forgotten about as easily. According to Slips, Trips, and Falls UK, 37% of all work-reported injuries in the UK were as a result of a slip, trip, or fall. Furthermore, according to the Health and Safety Executive UK, 95% of major slips cause broken bones and can be the starting-point of other illnesses.
Slips and trips,
thus, are not always harmless. In fact, they can disable you for life.
Suffering from slip and trip injuries is not the worst thing that can happen to you. Without your knowing it, you might also be suffering from injuries resulting from slips and trips that were not through your own fault. In cases such as these, not only is your body hurt, but you are also forgoing your right for a just compensation.
The Three Requirements
When can you demand other people to compensate you? In settling personal injury claims, claimants are required to prove with a “preponderance of evidence” three things in order to show that other people are liable for their injuries. First, they must prove that the persons they are demanding compensation from owed them a duty of care. Second they must prove that these individuals breached this duty. Finally, they must prove that it was this breach that caused their injuries.
Thus, if you can prove that the people you are claiming compensation from had a responsibility to keep you safe, that they have failed in that duty, and that this failure resulted in the harm you are now suffering, then you can demand for compensation from them.
A Short Comparison
To help you determine whether your slip and trip injuries were caused by the negligence of other people and if you can claim for compensation from them, an example might help.
Suppose you were entering a restaurant, and as you stepped in, you slipped because you were busy chatting away with your friends and did not see the mat on the floor where you should have dried your footwear first. In a case such as this, you slipped because of your own negligence (in this case, your inattention), and even if you incurred serious injuries, then unfortunately, it is more probable for the courts to side with the establishment you entered than with you because you did not do your part to avoid getting injured. The restaurant, by placing a mat on the floor, did not breach their duty of care to their customers.
However, if you were entering a restaurant and slipped while doing so because there was no mat at all on the floor, even if it was snowing outside, then there is a possibility for you to claim compensation. This is because the restaurant staff owed all their customers a duty of care, and in a foreseeable accident like a slip, they should have been more responsible in ensuring your safety. By not placing a mat on the floor, they have breached their responsibility to secure your well-being from predictable accidents and could be liable for the damages you sustained.
In conclusion, injuries resulting from slips and trips are due to other people’s negligence if those injuries were caused by those people’s failure to perform the safety precautions that others could have reasonably expected from them.
