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The Health and Safety executive annual figures for 2012/2013 show that there were 78,000 injuriies to employees reported under RIDDOR. In 2011/12 27 million working days were lost due to work-related illness and workplace injury. Your employer has a duty to protect you and tell you about health and safety issues that affect you. They also have a legal responsibilities which include reporting certain accidents and incidents, paying you statutory sick pay, or contractual sick pay if you are entitled to it and give you time off because of an accident at work should you need it. Your employer must report serious work-related accidents, diseases and dangerous incidents to the Health and Safety Executive. They must report death, major injuries (a broken arm for example) or dangerous incidents like the collapse of scaffolding.The reporting must be done by your employer, but if you’re involved it’s a good idea to make sure it’s been reported. Any injury at work – including minor injuries – should be recorded in your employer’s ‘accident book’. All employers must keep an accident book. It’s mainly for the benefit of employees, as it provides a useful record of what happened in case you need time off work or need to claim compensation later on. But recording accidents also helps your employer to see what’s going wrong and take action to stop accidents in future. In order to try to prevent such incidents from occurring your employer has to carry out a risk assessment and do what’s needed to take care of the health and safety of employees and visitors. This includes deciding how many first aiders are needed and what kind of first aid equipment and facilities should be provided. First aiders have no statutory right to extra pay, but some employers do offer this. Employees must also take reasonable care over their own health and safety. In most cases, if you need time off because of an accident at work, you’ll only have the right to Statutory Sick Pay. Your employer may have a scheme for paying more for time off caused by accidents, or may decide to pay extra depending on what has happened. If you need any advice on these issues please contact a health and safety consultant like Walker Health and Safety.
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