You may wear gloves at work to keep your hands safe, but some tasks are impossible in gloves or even made more dangerous by wearing gloves. In any case, the need to be literally hands-on with a project often leads to quite serious hand injuries like amputation and degloving.
If that happens at work, Workers’ Compensation should be required to pay for your medical bills and most of your lost earnings, plus additional damages if you suffer a permanent amputation or lost function. Our lawyers can fight to get you these damages, and potentially even additional damages.
Call our hand and degloving injury lawyers at Cardamone Law by dialing (267) 651-7945 today.
Common Examples of Hand Injuries
Hand injuries usually fall into a few common categories:
Broken Bones
Fractures in the hand and fingers might not totally disable you, but more serious injuries with multiple breaks commonly can. You may even need surgery to install pins and screws to properly set the injury, leading to time away from work.
Crush Injuries
Getting caught in machinery can crush your hand so badly that it results in amputations or permanent lost function, let alone broken bones.
Avulsions and Degloving
When skin or fingers are torn away in a traumatic accident, this is called an avulsion. With hand injuries, the skin is often pulled up, rolling away from the muscle like a glove coming off. These “degloving” injuries can involve amputations and require multiple surgeries and a long healing period.
Amputation
Traumatic amputations can sometimes be reattached, but even a successful reattachment can still lead to months away from work while you heal.
What is a Degloving Injury?
As mentioned, a degloving injury is a type of avulsion, where the skin and potentially even your fingers are torn off your hand. These can happen in many ways but often result from something pressing against your hand or arm in a scraping motion, such as in a vehicle accident or machinery accident.
“Ring avulsions” are often common and can result in surprisingly severe injuries. In this accident, a wedding ring or other ring is often twisted then pulled in such a way that it can essentially flay your finger, potentially even disconnecting it at the joint.
This amputation and tearing of the skin can require intensive surgical care. However, some degloving injuries are also closed, internal injuries, where the skin is not broken, but the muscle still separates from the skin, leading to pooling fluid and requiring additional medical care just to find and confirm the injury, let alone treat it.
Can You Sue for Hand Injuries at Work?
Your ability to sue for work injuries, including hand injuries, is limited. Most employees cannot sue their employer for work-related injuries, and the employer is instead required to cover them through Workers’ Compensation insurance.
However, this requirement only applies to “employees.” Independent contractors are technically self-employed and, depending on whether their classification is proper and what their contract says about suing for injury, they are not blocked from suing a client for a work accident.
However, you typically have to sue the party or parties that actually caused the injury. If your employer did not cause your injury and some third party did, then these rules do not stop you from suing that third party.
This is commonly a driver who caused a work-related auto accident or an equipment manufacturer whose defective product injured you, especially for hand injuries. For example, defective gloves that failed to keep you safe even though they were rated for the kind of accident you faced might be grounds to sue the manufacturer.
What Does Workers’ Compensation Cover in a Hand Injury Case?
Workers’ Compensation pays no-fault benefits in three categories:
Medical Bills
These expenses pay to treat any and all medical care you need for your hand or finger injury. Our hand and degloving injury lawyers can explain to you what care is covered and how to go about getting it.
In most cases, you need to treat with a physician on your employer’s approved “panel doctor” list for the initial 90 days of care. However, degloving and other injuries might require specialists, and if that specialist is not on the list, you can seek care from an unlisted specialist.
Lost Earnings
Lost earnings typically pay 2/3 of your lost earnings from before the accident, but there are limits. The state sets a statewide average weekly wage (AWW), and that is the maximum weekly pay you can receive. There are also floors to help low earners get potentially as much as 90% of their AWW or half the statewide AWW, whichever is less.
If you are working with a lower wage while recovering from your injury, you may get 2/3 of the difference between your old and new wages instead.
Specific Loss
Again, typically at a rate of 2/3 your AWW, you can receive additional payments on account of amputation or permanent lost function. These pay a different number of weeks’ worth of benefits for each lost finger or hand.
Again, these benefits also have a cap and floor to keep in mind.
What Isn’t Covered Through Workers’ Compensation?
Note that pain and suffering damages were not included in Workers’ Compensation. You can potentially claim these damages in a separate lawsuit, along with the remaining 1/3 of your lost earnings and other economic damages from the accident.
Remember, employees cannot sue their employer, but a lawsuit against a negligent third party can supply these missing damages. However, that lawsuit will also pay for things you already had covered under your employer’s Workers’ Comp insurance, such as medical bills.
This gives your employer and their insurance carrier a “subrogation claim,” where they can get paid back for their payouts through the winnings in your lawsuit. Our attorneys can guide you on how much this might be, but it is still typically in your interest to file a lawsuit even if you already received some of your payments.
This is, in part, a testament to how much pain and suffering damages can often be, especially for a quite painful and traumatic injury like degloving, avulsions, or finger amputations.
Call Our Work Injury Attorneys for Hand and Degloving Injuries in Allentown
Call (267) 651-7945 today to speak with the hand and degloving injury lawyers at Cardamone Law about your potential case.
