Dear Members,

As a follow on from my post in regards to work relatedness I was wondering if any of you have had dealt with the following situation before and what the outcome was if you did.

After an incident the injured person has to return to or be able to return to work within 24 hours otherwise this is considered an LTI. I need to know is there any leeway in regards to extenuating circumstances, i.e. working in remote locations where it can take nearly two days to have the person seen by a surgeon after being initially stabilised by a medic. This is due to the incident on my project where the person visited two hospitals to have no one available to treat him and it was almost two days later before he could be seen and operated on to repair his ruptured tendon.

Thanks Descarte 8, yes I am aware of at least medical treatment but it is the defining of the 24 hrs period, which is all fine and dandy when you are working in a big city etc. But my project is a remote location and the hospitals are not exactly what you would call a hospital as the surgeon goes on holiday and there is no other replacement etc. plus these are also a considerable distance by car / ambulance on a treacherous road.

An LTI can be whatever you want it to be. There is no legal definition nor is there any legal requirement to categorise accidents in any way whatsoever, other than those spelt out in RIDDOR and even then the categories are only for the purposes of reporting.

That said, you have total freedom in categorising accidents for your own purposes. What ever meets your requirements for prioritising investigations, reporting to various levels within your organisation, trending etc is OK. At the end of the day it's up to you what you do with the information.

LTIs are normally used as a comparator so that you can benchmark against similar organisations. They set a standard measure, usually one full shift off work. But that absence is supposed to be as a direct result of the accident, not as a result of some other factor, such as the lack of medical assistance. If you are using LTIs as some sort of comparator, such as LTI frequency rate then the only variable should be the number of LTIs otherwise the comparison is flawed.

After many hours of deliberation and discussion between medical staff, client etc it has been deemed that in the medical opinion he would have been seen as an outpatient and discharged after surgery around 2 hours later. As his role is a helper which can be anything really it has been decided to put this forward to the reporting authority as a restricted work case. So I will just have to wait and see if they accept this as such. I will post when I have received the outcome to let you all know. Thanks everyone for your inputs and thoughts on this matter.