If you have suffered a psychiatric injury as a result of a traumatic incident that happened in the workplace, what your employer did to prevent this type of incident, and what they did following the incident, will all be relevant in determining their liability for your injury.
If you feel your employer handled your situation the wrong way, this may amount to your employer breaching their duty of care if it results in your further psychiatric injury. An employer has a duty of care to ensure the health, safety and well being of their employees. This includes taking reasonable actions to prevent the psychiatric injury of employees.
In order to establish whether your employer has breached their duty of care to prevent your psychiatric injury (or any other personal injury), you will need to establish (a) that the risk of injury was foreseeable; (b) that the risk was significant; and, (c) in the circumstances, a reasonable person in the employer’s position would have taken the precautions.
In terms of how your employer responded to a traumatic incident that you were subjected to in the workplace, recent cases have shown us that this plays into whether the appropriate pre-cautions were taken by an employer to prevent injury. This is the case in that if an employer is not adequately prepared to respond to, and deal with, a traumatic incident in the workplace in an appropriate manner, it may cause further psychiatric injury to an employee. One such case which established this precedent is the Greenway case.
For more detail on this type of situation please read our article Psychiatric Injury and Employers Duty of Care: Precautions to Take.
If you believe that the actions of your employer have caused a psychiatric injury, we encourage you to seek legal advice as soon as possible. If you would like to know more about determining if your employer has breached their duty of care, or about how to make a claim, call our No Win No Fee Lawyers for assistance today.
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