Hi all, just wanted to run through a scenario which I'm 50/50 on and would like to tap in to your experience.

Employee slips on a staircase, feels some pain in his back and so his line manager signs him off for the rest of the day and he returns to work the next day. A few days later the same pain re-occurs and he is signed off work for 2 weeks. 

Under the key definitions, I wanted to know if this would be classed as seperate and identifiable? It could in my opinion be argued both ways, please let me know your thoughts, 

thanks in advance

Originally Posted by: hardworkingdude

I wanted to know if this would be classed as seperate and identifiable? 

I would say it was. They fell on the stairs and hurt their back. You know which single incident caused what specific injury. As Chris rightly points out, this is more of a question of whether it was work related.

Originally Posted by: hardworkingdude

So he was climbing some stairs in a property that belonged to a customer while carrying some tools.

If the property and therefore the stairs belong to a customer how does the employer excercise any control over the state of the premises?

“If the property and therefore the stairs belong to a customer how does the employer exercise any control over the state of the premises?”

Of course, they don’t, as Peter, said its not an admission of guilt, its just system for the HSE to a) obtain stats and b) given them some idea of what is going on. If, assuming that they  have nothing else to on the day that this RIDDOR report appears on the to of the TO DO, pile they would look at it and say: let’s investigate this at the location this incident happened” which is what you fill in when you do your RIDDOR report. Of course, it’s no going to be investigated by the HSE but unfortunately some people use the number of RIDDORs as a metric. This means that, any RIDDOR is deemed a failure of the management system and if possible should not reported or some how argued away usually be asking RIDDOR questions on this forum!

My query isn't there to try and hide a RIDDOR, it is more to gain an understanding of whether a RIDDOR is required. My first query is:

1. If an employee returns to work within 7 days, then signs off sick for over 7 days later, is this classed as an over 7 day injury? If yes, what kind of timeline would this be for? Imagine he/she signs off 2 months later and relates the injury back to this specific occurance?

2. The employee slipped off a staircase at a customer's property. Yes I agree this is not our jurisdiction, but the employee will be classed as guilty for not adhering to safety procedures in place i.e carrying tools in both hands while using the stairs. 

If the employee signed off straight away for 7 days or more, I would be reporting this due to it being identifiable and definitely work related. However, the employee has continued to work and then signed off days later which then makes it ambiguous whether this was something identifiable or not (because of the lag in his absence).

Hardworkingdude sorry if any offence was taken but there does seem to be a culture of avoiding RIDDOR reporting at all costs in some places and a lot of the questions on the forum seem to be about how to do that.

IO had a similar thing some years back: an employee slipped in a field (not our field) and had to take a few days off to recover. It was reported to have returned to work within a week, so no RIDDOR.

There was a cursory investigation into the slip: he was carrying out a statutory inspection of a field of daffodils, which was wet and uneven (no s**t) it being February. There was nothing we could reasonably do apart from my suggestion of using a drone. Back then nobody used drones, so my suggestion was laughed at. Couple of months later I was informed by our OH provider that the person in question had gone on long-term sick. The had not fully recovered from the slip and the fall had apparently exacerbated an existing condition. He was of course looking for compo. After a bit of umming and arghing I logged this as a RIDDOR: he had fallen and suffered an injury that had caused him to take more than 7 days off work. There was no response from the HSE.  He got his compo although nobody in the Treasury Solicitors office asked about any RIDDORs so it didn’t influence that either.

What does this prove:

Mainly that we worry too much about RIDDORs:

• The HSE don’t usually follow them up
• They are not an admission of liability, so they make little difference to civil claims
• As a metric unless you have loads of them, they don’t really mean much

If everything carried out at work was work-related, work would be a lot more efficient than it is.

Brian

May be I am not tainted [DELETE "tainted" and INSERT "jaded and sometimes disillusioned"!] by staying on with HSE!

I wrote earlier:

"Not for the first time on the Forums my suggestion would be to read what the RIDDOR Regulations state, rather than the HSE guidance, parts of which appear to me to be drafted to provide excuses not to report. (Helps keep the stats down and make the UK look better than it otherwise might!)

Regulation 2(1) includes a definition of “work related accident”:

“work-related accident” means an accident arising out of or in connection with work."

I think the guidance you quote is exemplifies why I wrote what I did.

If HSE want to change the law to mean what it says in the guidance they can recommend a rewriting of RIDDOR.

My intepretation of RIDDOR is that "out of or in connection with work" is tantamount to "at work" as defined in Section 52 of the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974 EXCEPT when doing things "in the course of his employment" that are not within their terms of reference for their job.

However, I don't think that the distinction has ever been tested in Court at the level which would provide authoritative case law.

So to contrast:

If two people are standing at the water cooler chatting about last night's football,  then I think that they are "at work" within the meaning of Section 52, but not doing something "in connection with work" (always assuming that they are not e.g. football journalists!!)

If the same two people are standing in the same place discussing the project on which one or both are working with a view to furthering that project - one one might be seeking the opinion of the other who is NOT working on that project - then it seems to me that any accident would be "in connection with work" - EVEN if it involves the person NOT working on THAT project (unless for some exotic reason THAT person might be deemed to be on a "frolic of his own").

So, I don't actually think that the fact that the injured person in the accident was "carrying tools" is particularly relevant except to help demonstrate that they were climbing the stairs "in connection with work". If those stairs were their means of access to their workplace then climbing them was "in connection with work".

For the purposes of RIDDOR the condition of the stairs is entirely irrelevant, as is whether there was a handrail, its condition, or whether the injured person was using it.

For the purposes of other legislation and common law these variables are all relevant to the liabilities of various parties.

In practice, HSE has helped drive down reporting beyond the underreporting that was always prevalent to such an extent that when reporting to Eurostat the UK does not bother with using RIDDOR as its statistical database, but rather the Labour Force Survey which gives much higher numbers of injured people and markedly more who are ill.

Edited by user 13 November 2020 15:44:17(UTC)  | Reason: Amended in line with response

Brian - I will retract the adjective "tainted"!

Fully agree that many changes to incident reporting requirements in the UK have been politically motivated with pressure on HSE (as the body given responsibility for the drafting of each change) to bend to the often deregulatory mood of HM Government.

In recent years that pressure has also impacted the quality of HSE guidance so as to represent legal duties as "lite" as possible. So, as example, the current guidance on CDM, L153 is much less clear than that in the previous Approved Code of Practice, L144.

P