An amputation is one of the most severe injuries that can happen on the job. The impact can be life-changing. You may never work in that profession again. Even with quick medical help, you may not fully recover.
Is an amputation something that you need to worry about at work, or is it such a rare occurrence that you don’t really need to concern yourself with it?
Amputation injuries are rare, but perhaps not as rare as you’d think. For instance, in 2015, 2,644 workers suffered amputation injuries, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. That’s more than seven amputations per day, assuming a seven-day work week.
The report from OSHA was looking at injuries that qualified as “severe” and that were also linked back to workplace conditions. The total statistics are even more dire, showing that there were 10,388 such injuries that year. Interestingly, only 7,636 hospitalizations were reported.
Still, that’s more than 28 severe injuries per day. While those stats do encompass the entire United States, they do help to shed some light on just how dangerous the workplace can be.
Workers sometimes have a tendency to grow complacent. If you’ve been working in the same job for ten years without incident, you start thinking that it won’t happen to you. These statistics show that it certainly can, and it does happen to many people every year.
If you are seriously inured, especially if you will not be able to work again because of the injury, you need to know all of your rights to compensation as you work toward recovery.
Source: CNN, “Workplace accidents led to nearly 3,000 amputations in 2015,” Ahiza Garcia and Patrick Gillespie, accessed July 19, 2017
