If a heavy pallet lands on your foot or you slip and fall down the stairs at work, it’s pretty easy to showcase that any injuries you suffered were directly tied to that work-related accident. However, a fair amount of work-related injuries occur without a clear and obvious acute moment of trauma. Without this accident or event, are you out of luck when it comes to a work claim? We explain what you need to do if you hope to win a workers’ compensation claim that developed without a specific moment of injury.
Winning A No-Accident Work Claim
It’s going to be a little tougher to win your injury case if there was no clear moment of injury, but that certainly doesn’t mean that you’re any less entitled to workers’ compensation benefits than someone who suffered a specific accident at work. In fact, these types of injuries are quite common in our line of work. Oftentimes they are referred to as a repetitive strain or cumulative trauma injury, and certain employees are at a heightened risk for these types of injuries.
For example, let’s say you’re always performing the same manual tasks while you’re operating a machine press, or you’re regularly working on your hands and knees in confined spaces. All of this stress and strain will take its toll on your body, but it may not overload a structure in a specific moment. You may have just as much damage in your rotator cuff as someone who suffered a more obvious injury, it just accumulated slowly over the years.
In order to ensure you can collect workers’ compensation for these types of injuries, you’re going to need to establish what’s known as a causal connection between the two. And while you can probably argue that your work on the assembly line led to your shoulder injury, this causal connection needs to be established by an authoritative figure in the space, like a medical professional.
If you hope to earn workers’ compensation for cumulative trauma, you need to set up an independent medical exam with an experienced physician. They will take a closer look at your injuries, ask detailed questions about your line of work and your job duties, and they will likely take images of specific areas of your body with the help of an x-ray or MRI. All of this information will be used by the doctor to make a determination if your injuries have been directly caused by your work duties, or if you’re simply experiencing wear and tear brought on by the natural aging process. If the doctor clearly sees evidence of work-related damage, they may sign off on your petition for workers’ compensation benefits. Absent this professional evaluation and recommendation, it’s going to be next to impossible to get your employer’s insurance company to pay out a repetitive stress or cumulative trauma claim.
Since you’re already connecting with one professional to assist with the process, our recommendation is that you sync up with another to ensure everything runs smoothly with your claim. A workers’ compensation lawyer can help to build a strong case that clearly explains how your injuries are related to your work duty, and they’ll rely on the doctor’s report or testimony to strengthen this claim. A lawyer also knows how to put an accurate valuation on your case, so even if your doctor can help showcase that real injuries exist, securing an accurate claim award won’t be easy without a lawyer there to oversee the process. Don’t leave money on the table by trying to prove your case on your own, because you can bet that your employer’s insurance company will have lawyers on their side.
Let us help you get the compensation you deserve from a cumulative trauma, repetitive stress or similar injury that developed without an acute moment of injury. For more information, or for answers to questions about your work claim, reach out to the team at Hey Workers today at (844) 439-9675.
