What happens if an employee has an accident?
FACTS
– It takes on average 6 HOURS before an employee/relative is contacted in case an employee has an accident.
– Most employees do not have medical information for their employees nor do they have contact details for relatives. This leaves them stranded and unable to help.
– Most people do not carry medical information or emergency contact details on them. This prevents emergency personnel from providing optimum medical treatment and no relatives will be contacted until much later or sometimes never.
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QUESTIONS
– How does the employer ensure that the employee receives immediate optimum treatment in case of an accident?
– How does the employer ensure that he and the employee’s relatives are contacted immediately in case of an accident?
Jorgen
Jorgen Poulsen
3 Responses
Accidents
After the events of 9/11 and 7/7 it never ceases to amaze me at the number of organisation that do not hold accurate or even any next of kin/emergency contact details for their staff.
I have just worked for various organisations including some public sector organisations and I can without contradiction that a good 90% of organisations I have had exposure to would not have been able to deal with an accident or major incident as they had none of the necessary procedure or held the information on their employees, even when they did hold the information their was no regular validation or parts of the information were missing i.e. they held a home phone but no work number for the emergency conduct. So if an accident happen at 9am it would not be until some 8 or 9 hours later when the conduct arrived home would they be informed about the accident.
The issue of treatment cannot be seen as a company issue but one for the NHS and the emergency services.
Broken process
Hi Don,
I think that is prudent advice.
However, when you speak to employers they very rarely have this information or even a simple process and system in place to retrieve this information within minutes in case of emergency.
Even if they have this information they have no process in place to ensure that emergency responders know how to contact them to obtain the information.
Jorgen
Jorgen
Accident Notification
I always advise employers to obtain what I feel is critical information around this topic………like contact phone numbers in the event of emergencies, including their GP for those who disclose medical problems; medical information like confirmation of bloodtype where people work in more dangerous occupations; and be sure to have managers follow up on any instance where they feel there is some medical condition that has not been recorded in their personal files [which means that managers must also be well aware of personal information contained in these files rather than it being the private domain of the HR dept.