If you have been injured on the job or believe that you may have been injured on the job, then it is important to file an incident report with your employer in order to memorialize the accident causing the injury. A workplace injury can vary from an event causing life-altering injuries or even death, to spinal injury or sprained knee. Regardless of the type of injury, always report it to your supervisor or employer.
If you fail to promptly fill out an incident report when the injury happens, your employer may use this as reason to deny you medical treatment and/or out-of-work benefits. Without an incident report, the employer may even deny that the incident occurred at-all, or if there is a delay in filling out an incident report, then the employer may allege that the injury occurred outside of work.
Sometimes when someone is injured on the job, they do not feel like they need immediate medical attention. For example, you may have pulled your back lifting a heavy object, or twisted your knee while climbing on or off of a piece of equipment. Many people are tempted not to report this type of injury, because they don’t feel like they need immediate medical attention. Yet, after a nights sleep or even after a couple of days, the pain resulting from one of these injures could grow to become significantly worse. If you did not file an incident report right after the injury, then you may run into these unanticipated obstacles.
Additionally, an incident report that is completed immediately after an injury can be helpful to both employers and employees because it gives the most accurate account of what happened. Further, many incident forms will have a section that allows for witness statements. Often, your co-workers will witness an accident causing injury, and they can be your best account of the events that happened. Their testimony and statements made in an incident report can go a long was towards bolstering your workers’ compensation claim.
After you fill-out an incident report and ensure it is submitted properly, please be sure that you retain a copy of the report for your personal records.
If you or a loved one has been injured in a work related accident, contact the Goings Law Firm, LLC today. There can be many complicated factual and legal questions that injured workers may face in trying to obtain benefits that are allowed under South Carolina Workers’ Compensation laws. For a free case consultation, call Robert F. Goings at (803) 350-9230. This S.C. Workers’ Compensation law firm is here to answer your questions today.
