The 6 billion annual accident claims industry is big business in the United Kingdom. It includes claims for falls, for accidents that occur in workplaces, for negligence by medical staff or hospitals and a host of others.
While accidents caused by others (ie accidents that are often eligible for accident claims) do make up a good number of the UK’s accident statistics each year, accidents where we have nobody to blame but ourselves make up an even higher number of the total. Are we really as clumsy as the stats suggest?
The Home and Leisure Accidents stats figures are a great insight into what is causing our accidents and where they’re happening. It breaks annual incident totals into age, gender, location of accident, body part injured and objects involved! It’s rather a comprehensive database.
Some of the statistics within the Home and Leisure Accidents database are, to say the least, a little bit odd. Back in 2002, for example, a total of 24,641 people managed to injure themselves with “an uninjured body part.” That is to say, they injured themselves with themselves.
Bizarrely, this database shows that in the year 2002, 24,641 people suffered accidents involving an ‘uninjured body part.’ Almost 10,000 of these accidents took place inside the home! Now, thinking about accidents involving uninjured body parts conjures up all sorts of images of people treading on their own toes, catching themselves in the face with their own arm or just generally managing to twist, bend, tear or otherwise damage one part of their body – using another. Unfortunately, the RoSPA database doesn’t divulge details of specific incidents. This is a terrible shame because reading individual cases would undoubtedly prove entertaining.
Of course, we cannot find humour in every accident and accidents can be very serious. But I think, in the current age of accident claims culture, we’re forgiven for raising a subtle grin when visualising people injuring themselves with their own body parts! In that instance, surely, there is absolutely no grounds to blame anybody else or anything but your own clumsiness!
Clyde Colin is a claim experts, you can get complete and detailed information about accident claims by visiting his recommended site