Accidents in the Office

One of the most common accidents in an office environment is a slip, trip or fall. Your employer has a duty to provide a safe working environment for you. This includes preventing the risk of slips and trips, and ensuring that every floor and traffic route in your workplace is suitably constructed and free from obstructions and substances that may cause you to slip, trip or fall.

Your employer is also responsible for the acts and/or failures of their employees.  If you trip over an item such as a box of files that was left in an area where someone might trip over them, you may have grounds for a compensation claim. Similarly, your employer may be liable if there is no system in place to ensure the floors are cleaned regularly and you have slipped on a substance on the floor.   

It might not be immediately apparent but office work can involve a lot of manual handling tasks. Manual handling is any task that involves moving a load by carrying, pushing, pulling or lifting. This might be part of your daily tasks at work or something you may do less frequently. Examples in an office environment could be carrying files from one desk to another, taking large bottles of milk to a communal kitchen, or moving desks and other office furniture about. 

Done incorrectly, with the wrong equipment or with too heavy a load, manual handling can cause injury, often to your neck and back. Such tasks can also make any existing medical conditions worse.

Your employer should review the working practices and remove the need for any manual handling task where reasonably practicable. All unavoidable tasks involving manual handling should be risk assessed. The risk assessment should consider your particular abilities including whether you have any existing or previous injuries or if you are pregnant. Your employer ought to take reasonable steps to reduce the risk of injury to you while carrying out such tasks, by organising the work appropriately so there is adequate manpower, and by providing proper training and suitable equipment. 

It is common in office environments for this manual handling risk assessment to be overlooked. If you have sustained injuries in the office because of a manual handling task and a risk assessment could have prevented that then you could claim compensation.

In an office environment, there is not a lot of dangerous equipment but injuries can still happen. The most common work equipment accident in an office is one caused by a faulty chair but there could be issues with equipment such as printers, filing cabinets or desks.  Your employer has a duty to provide you with safe work equipment and it must be inspected on a regular basis. They must also remove faulty equipment immediately for repair.

If you are injured by faulty work equipment then you may be entitled to claim compensation for your work place injuries.