Say you run a bookshop, and even though the job isn’t too dangerous, you’re cautious anyway. Bookshelves aren’t too high, and all the furniture containing your merchandise is in full compliance with legal safety precautions. Now say at some point during your store’s run, a pair of rodents make a next where a handful of termites live, and an employee falls through the floor.
Or perhaps, maybe an employee is holding a pen, and another one stumbles on a shoelace, falling into the pen at the wrong angle and getting stabbed. Accidents happen, even in the most innocuous of circumstances, and employers need to be prepared. Some sort of insurance program needs to be available, and you need some level of control.
Rights And On-Site Insurance Options
Now if an employee is injured, they’ve got certain rights, and one of them will be compensation from your company for their injuries on your job site.
If you let them go to their own doctor, there’s some possibility they’ll get an estimate for medical attention which is far in excess of the actual injury. This is why solutions like work comp doctors in Portland are beneficial for employees and employers.
Getting such a doctor in an above-the-board kind of way will involve being sure they are properly qualified. On the one hand, you can be sure employees will get the real help they need.
On the other, you can control what that cost will be to a greater degree than merely trusting the judgment of an employee or their family. Additionally, you remain in compliance. Employer-sponsored insurance and medical professionals are advisable. However, this isn’t the only way to safeguard employees.
Best Practices
First and foremost, especially in a workplace where there is some danger of injury, it’s very important to establish proper safety protocols for your personnel. They should have the right safety equipment regularly available, they should know what to do and what not to do, and they shouldn’t be put in dangerous situations.
Injury Protocols
When an injury or accident of one kind or another does happen, you need to have real protocols in place. There should be response personnel if you’re a big enough and dangerous enough operation. If you’re the hypothetical book owner mentioned before, at the very least you should have some kind of safety kit available to patch up minor injuries.
Additionally, emergency contact information for responders should be readily available. Check the OSHA handbook for rights workers have, and be sure that what you’re doing matches such legal realities. Cutting corners here will bite you eventually. The easy answer is to just…not cut corners.
Regular Safety Audits
Once you have everything in place, you want to audit operations regularly to determine if everything is safe. As in the opening example referenced at the beginning of this writing, the possibility of structural degradation is possible. Over time, systems of order descend into chaos. There could be new safety issues you didn’t realize existed.
The larger you get, the more likely you’ll be audited. If you do it yourself, you can avoid being backhanded by violations from varying legal agencies.
Keeping Your Workplace Safe
Audit the premises of your workplace at intervals to get ahead of prescient issues. Have injury protocols in place for when the worst-case scenario develops.
This could involve medical equipment, or it could involve an entire team of response personnel. General operational best practices are additionally recommended to help you avoid putting employees in compromising situations, to begin with.
Lastly, ensure you’ve got a workman’s comp doctor available to both cut costs and avoid legal situations. You don’t want employees seeking the auspices of a personal injury lawyer if you can avoid it.
