Off The Record – Workers’ Comp – New Injury for an Old Compensation Claim

Video Transcript

So, today I wanted to discuss what happens when someone has an injury on the job. In particular, the thing that I see come up often is a back injury because the thing with back injuries is that they can be chronic in the sense that you can injure your back, and then you can do good for a while, and then you might have a reoccurrence of that injury. It could be just that the problem reoccurs, or you could have a new accident and injure the same area.

So, recently, we had a client who ran into a situation where they had injured their back years ago on the job, it was documented. And they had a workers compensation case. Recently, they had a new accident on the job, and they were advised by their employer that they were not going to fill out a new accident form and not going to process it as a new claim because he already had a claim open for that injury. So, that’s something that you do also need to consult with an attorney on and we guide people through because the thing is this, if you have a new accident, okay? Meaning something specifically happens at work where you injure your back, your knee, whatever it may be, you have to and you should file a new claim because a lot of the dynamics are different. There could be a different insurance carrier. First of all, you could be working for a different company, but I’m speaking specifically about if you’re within the same company there could be different insurance. Your wages may have changed, which could affect your disability benefit. Your wages may be more, which means that you’re entitled to a higher disability benefit than maybe you were 10 years ago whenever the first incident occurred.

So, it’s very important that you contact us straightaway if you’ve had a new incident. And even if you’re not certain about how to go about it, you need to call in because once again, if you don’t file the correct paperwork and things just progress in a way that’s not beneficial to you, you could actually be harming yourself and it could affect your disability benefits. So, new incident, you have to call in and you should file a new claim. Many people with a back injury, they could be bending over and your back goes out. We all know that happens. Just call in. Give us the mechanics, the mechanism of injury. We’ll guide you through it because you wanna make sure you protect yourself.