Thread: Workplace Health and Safety!

Me too, the only prof to have accidents in her classes (Art Department) was the safety officer for the college.
Yup!
~Richard

You know, most of our compatriots who have responded have hit the nail on the head. It is absolutely fantastic that your employer was so willing to make sure you got what you needed, especially over such a minuscule thing.

Here in the US, the attitudes are much, much different... It's a constant thing to first try and blame the employee, then do all you can to pay as little as possible toward treating the injury.

I remember when I once sliced my thumb open down to the bone. It was before I had clocked in (since we weren't supposed to do so any earlier than 5 minutes before our scheduled time), though I was attempting to repair my tape measure before I started working. Needless to say, I started going into shock and recognized the symptoms immediately (thank you, Boy Scouts of America). I told a fellow employee to go grab our boss so I could inform him. When he came out into the shop from the office, his first words were "Are you okay?"... His second words were "You just remember that you did this on your time, not mine."

I probably could have fought for him to cover any medical costs, given that while I wasn't technically clocked in (per the employer's own rules), I was trying to repair a tool for use on the job while in the shop.

Instead, I just used some super glue, a paper towel and some electrical tape to close the wound and went to work. Still have the scar on my thumb.

Even if you have a similar system like The Workers Compensation Board in each of our provinces there is still a lot of chucking and jiving with the employer and WCB to get things sorted out. Getting medical treatment is usually never a problem and you are covered on your way to and home from work. The Spanish Inquisition starts after you have been medically treated as both the employer and the WCB seem to attempt to minimize the cost of the accident to each. It is never fun to feel like you are being gang raped.

To be fair there are people who do play the system for their own advantage and to the detriment of those who honestly need help. I don't know who I resent more, the advantage takers or a system that appears to be interested in cost saving in the end.

Bob

A couple of weeks ago I had a stupid pocket knife incident for which I needed 3 stiches. This happened in Norway.
I went to the ER, got stitched, and it cost me a whopping total of 55 euro or such.
A US doctor friend of mine told me that the same treatment (on a saturday evening) would have cost me 2500$,

So yes, be glad that like me, you get treated decently, because in the US, it would be a completely different story. The ludicrous cost of basic treament is probably partly to blame. Companies here don't fuss about such accidents because the cost to them is negligible.

Bruno

I am shocked that you had to pay for ER treatment.

Bob

This incident happened to a co-worker years ago. He worked at a heavy duty truck repair shop and was changing shock absorbers on a big van frame. The jack slipped and about 1 inch of his index finger got cut off. Nobody in the shop would drive him to the hospital so he drove himself there.

Some days we are simply on our own.

Originally Posted by mrsell63

This incident happened to a co-worker years ago. He worked at a heavy duty truck repair shop and was changing shock absorbers on a big van frame. The jack slipped and about 1 inch of his index finger got cut off. Nobody in the shop would drive him to the hospital so he drove himself there.

Some days we are simply on our own.

Lovely, just lovely.

Bob

Originally Posted by mrsell63

This incident happened to a co-worker years ago. He worked at a heavy duty truck repair shop and was changing shock absorbers on a big van frame. The jack slipped and about 1 inch of his index finger got cut off. Nobody in the shop would drive him to the hospital so he drove himself there.

Some days we are simply on our own.

Wow. That is just insane...

Originally Posted by mrsell63

This incident happened to a co-worker years ago. He worked at a heavy duty truck repair shop and was changing shock absorbers on a big van frame. The jack slipped and about 1 inch of his index finger got cut off. Nobody in the shop would drive him to the hospital so he drove himself there.

Some days we are simply on our own.

Talk about adding insult to injury... literally.

That's really horrendous and a real eye opener.

On what Bruno said earlier regarding the cost of medical treatment, I do often wonder about this. There's two sides to any equation, and at least here in Australia everyone seems to focus on the "consumer" side. As in, people seem to take the cost from the "provider" side as a given, and look for ways to recompense the "consumer" through government rebates and so on.

But I often wonder how the medical profession can get away with the prices that are charged for things. If it were another industry I am sure there'd be outcry and enquiry, but somehow medicine seems immune to market pressures, competition and scrutiny of pricing. It seems to me that a genuinely cumbersome and bloated system has been allowed to develop where everyone's snout is in the trough, from drug companies to insurance companies and everything in between, and the "solution" is to just let that all percolate as it wants and just pass on the resulting bloat to the consumer in the form of a price.

It's the same approach Microsoft used for its operating system - patch after patch after patch leading to a bloated, slow and ultimately fatally flawed product where the consumer had to adapt themselves to the product instead of the other way around.

Of course, you can go buy a competing operating system. What's the alternative with medicine?

James.