Slipped Disc At Work – Claim Injury Compensation For A Herniated Disc

Hi, I work in childcare for only a year and have slipped a disc in my lower spine due to not being being given adult chairs to sit on, carrying children, lifting and moving equipment, bending and sitting awkwardly for 8-10 hours a day. The only training I have been given on lifting and manual handling was online. There have been many occasions where practitioners like myself don’t get support while carrying out our daily routines. And now I am in excruciating pain everyday depending on medications like tramadol just to get through the day and still having to work. Do you think I have a claim?

I have been moving tables on my own at work but it should be two people job!
Due to this I have slipped my disk and I have been off work for almost 3 months and now I need a back surgery!
The job has said that I need to resign from the post or they will let me go.
What are my options, because now I will be unable to work for 10 – 12 weeks?

I started working with healthcare company on 1st May 2019 as a health care assistant (hca). Within 5months of working as a hca I damaged my lower back .
As a result of that on 11th January 2020 I was hospitalised and I had a back surgery.

I have never fully recovered with ongoing pain in my left knee and leg. I am not able to return to previous work since that time.

I wonder if I can claim any compensation from the company?

I’m writing tentatively to inquire about how long after an injury at work can someone make a claim for damages?
I worked at my previous workplace for 11 years, the first few of these as bronze caster. Heavy lifting every day in a small workshop with no lifting tackle.

Health and safety was an afterthought and run by someone who didn’t really care too much if people got injured at work. I was injured more than once there.

I have a herniated disc in my lumbar, I have no sexual function anymore and I rely on a cocktail of pain killing medication as a result of my back injury. I also twisted my ankle at work whilst workIng there.

I left in 2016, but have been in terrible daily pain ever since the injuries. I’m under the care of Kidderminster Treatment Centre Physiotherapy department and my quality of life if awful. Can you help?

I was having problems with my hand first all numb and tingling and weak to lift things. I went to doctor and he sent me for X-ray for hand and thumb, I took 5 weeks off work on Ssp sick pay then went back to work at haulage company. I told work I phoned doctor and doctor said go straight to a+e at hospital to get looked at straight away. I was there all day doing tests, brain scan, MRI Scan and other tests and at end of day was told I have a prolapse spine and will need surgery.

Hello,
I had a accident at work which resulted in me having a bulging disc protrusion at L4 L5 which is permanently sat on my sciatic nerve along with a damaged elbow. I had an MRI scan which shows these injuries. My treatment is now ongoing as I’ve been in chronic pain for 10 months.
I’ve had lumbar spine epidural injection, I’m due a medial block injection to see if this improves my pain and I am currently on a high dosage of gabapentin (600mg 3 times per day) to help manage my pain. If the injections fail to improve my chronic pain then I’ve been instructed that I’ll have to have spinal surgery.

The accident happened due to my manager giving me one to one training at a clients work shop and instructed me to use the wrong size drums. I should have used a 115 litre drum but used a 205 litre drum. These 205 litre drum when full of dense solution weighs above 300kg, and we are asked to manually transport them to our vehicles. It was the overall weight of the drum that caused my injuries.

My Manager told me to follow his training and to not deviate at all from it. There was no risk assessment done on me to undertake the job safely.
I have done basic manual handling modules but I was told to work in the way that suited my Manager.

I started work with a company around February / March time. The line of work is a delivery driver for a cash and carry firm, so we deliver heavy goods to the restaurant/ bar/ shops hospitality industry etc. When i started the job there was a manger that employed me who has been with the company for many years.

At the beginning he kept on advising that myself and a colleague that started the job with me that we would receive training, this was never done due to the busy work load. Although we did have some fire safety training, we never received any manual handling training. There was one day when he gathered a few drivers together because head office had shown up and said that we need to talk about manual handling. It lasted less than 5 minutes, and asked us to sign a sheet, i cannot remember if i had signed the paper but it was not a proper manual handling training.

Towards the end of July was experiencing slight back pain problems and muscle cramps, they were putting the manager that employed me under investigation and i was now dealing with new managers, i told them i had back pain and that the work load was too much, they said i would need to carry on.
We had a procedure that we do not deliver to companies up any flights of stairs / go in any lifts etc. One day a company instructed i do so, i refused, when i went back to tell management they insisted it has to be done. I done it. I felt my back playing up from here as i had to push cages onto a carpet through the office floor loaded up with kilos of coco cola etc. When i told managers this shouldn’t be allowed and that my back is hurting they sent a supervisor with me to risk asses the building. We got told for this client we should absolutely be delivering to them upstairs.

I am now told i have a prolapsed disk L5-S1 with an impinged nerve causing sciatica and it is coming up to 4 months.

Communication with work has been absolutely terrible and now they now have got rid of the manager that employed me and now they have got rid of the next manager that was pushing more work, the managers that are there now i have never met and communication is unacceptably poor. They now want to do a home visit after i have complained consistently the lack of communication.

Please can you advise what i do? And most importantly if it is worth making a claim. My current condition has me in and out of A and E on bad days, still taking my medication, limited and pretty much bounded to my home. Sleep deprived, absolutely stressed out, worried for my job security. I feel my independence has been completely taken away and fond chores around the house painful along with as much of a challenge as putting on my socks daily. Feel neglected as a staff member and i can do nothing until the neurology team get back to me. I also feel as though when they got rid of the first manager they should have gone through a proper manual handling instruction as well as listen when i said that the work load was way to much especially when i told them i was experiencing back problems.

Coming up to a year ago I got injured at work. As each day passed my colleagues had to help me when usually they didn’t. I worked through the pain but after three days the pain become unbearable. The next day I went to my local GP. I was signed off by the doctor for a potential disc issue. My employer spoke to me about writing something in the accident book. I was in a lot of pain, taking many medications and severely sleep deprived. I could not give an answer as to where I though I had been injured but my manager said we would talk about this again at a later date. This did not happen. I didn’t think too much of it at the time because I thought I would only be off work for a few weeks. Instead it was six months of physio and absolutely agony. In hindsight there are many practices that aren’t correct or safe that I am certain caused my injury. Other colleagues have since been getting similar injuries.

Since then I have had an MRI and seen a neurologist. I have/had a very large disc herniation. I was advised I may need surgery but for the moment it is being monitored. Today I am still on medication and pain does come and go. I have since returned to work.

It has been logged on my medical notes that it was done at work and that it was something done over a period of time. Which is why I could not give a definitive answer to my manager as to when I had got injured. Since then I have been asked if a health and safety assessor went out on location with me, they haven’t…. I have had no manual handling training.

I need to write a letter explaining this to my manager but fear my employers will find a way to dismiss me. My experience with them during my time off and currently has not been so pleasant. Prior to my injury it was the opposite. The thing is I’m not planning on staying with this company. Should I write a letter now or just before I leave? I have financial commitments and I am sort of stuck for six months or so before I can go. Would it make things more difficult for me to make a potential claim the longer I leave it?

I started my job in March 2017 I started not long after that with back pain and went to the doctor several times I have now had an mri scan which shows I have a bulging disc in my lower back which is what is causing my pain but as far as I can rember it was months after I started working for the company that I had a Manual handling course I now do not work for them as my back hurts too much I was working on the highways I finished work 7 weeks ago and have suffered for nearly 2 years solid as I could not afford to have time off work and I also now have suspected carpel tunnel syndrome in both hands is this something I have a case with, thanks.

Hi Ian,
I recently had an accident at work whilst lifting a barrel of beer. I have been asked many times personally to go and collect these barrels from the ground floor with a small trolley to roll it on. You then have to take it off of the wheels and place it on the floor behind the bar. I haven’t had much trouble lifting these before but one day they asked me to do it I felt like a sharp twinge in my back. I felt like I twisted funny and pulled something. I took myself to A&E and they said it was just a muscle strain as there was a lot of inflammation. I could barely sleep, bend, walk, sit back without it hurting at all! I was in agony. I decided to turn to a chiropractor after a while and when some of the swelling had gone down. After an examination she believed that I had slipped my disc in my back. Disc bulges run in my family and found out from a MRI a few years ago that I was in the early stages of this. There was no training on manual lifting, and wasn’t made aware of an accident book to write any form of report. So I’m not too sure if management have filed one? My colleague had also informed me that they had done training on lifting and bending a while after my accident. Seems to me that they were trying to cover themselves for any future incidents. I have been in constant pain for over 3/4 months now, stuck on medication and struggle to work. I would want to try and make a claim against my work place as now the rest of my life is affected by this and struggle with everyday tasks.
Please let me know what you think and advise if there is anything I can do to make my case stronger.

Hi I’ve just been diagnosed with a prolapsed disc and awaiting surgery, i work in a manufacturing environment which involves a lot of bending and lifting, I think over time this as contributed to my injury, there is nothing logged but over a long period of time we have asked for a lifting device but told it would cost to much, this as repeatedly been reported to health and safety, would it be worth putting in a valid claim?

Was hurt at work helping a plumber do his job, I ended up putting my back out, herniated disc plus trapped nerves and numbness around groin and hip.

I have worked for my employer for five and a half years, two and a half of which were via an agency. For over a year now I have had lower back pain so I went to the Doctors and was sent for a scan which showed that I had a slight bulged disc. This injury/damage leaves me in pain and unable to do my job which involves repetitive bending and lifting.

I have had a lot of time off work and it has cost me a lot of money. I complained to my employer as I had not had any manual handling. The employer ignored this report for a while but as I kept on about it I received a letter from work to attend a meeting. When I went in for the meeting, the employer gave me a manual handling course.

I was off sick with the pain in my back and was put through lifting exercises and watched a video. That was six months ago but the damage was already done by that time. I am back to work now, but needed the last two weeks off with back pain. The results of my scan says at L4-5 disc dehydration with broad annulardisc bulging is associated with mild degenerate hypertrophy of the posterior elements. This is resulting in mild symmetrical stenosis of the L5 lateral recesses.

I have a slipped disc in the lumbar spine. I believe this has occurred from repetitively lifting/twisting to reach heavy items on the deli counter at work. I am having a discectomy at the end of this month. Is there any way of proving this and claiming compensation?

10 month’s ago at work in a warehouse, a crate tipped over and I caught the weight of it on my back unknowingly. It was probably shimmed to prevent it from tipping as it was a tall and thin crate.

I now have been dealing with two herniated discs and a lot of pain every day. I’ve been to doctors and filed a worker’s incident report with my job at the time of injury. Do I have any options?

I was working using a lorry mounted crane(hiab) and whilst lifting a pallet that was loaded with heavy blocks the pallet tilted and the blocks slipped off. This is because the blocks should have been banded together in a certain way then banded to the pallet, this would have stopped them slipping off. As I was clearing them from the bed of the lorry lifting them I suffered a slipped disc in my back which I needed surgery for and was off work for 7 months on ssp. When I started the job I wasn’t given no manual handling training or any sort of training in use of equipment or products. On returning to work on the second day I was subjected to aggressive and verbal abuse from the foreman and when I complained he made up a story I was. I was immediately suspended and told by my manager I’m a “bad apple”.I think this is because I started a claim. Now 7 month on my solicitor says I ain’t got a case because my gp didn’t make a note of how I sustained my injury. Surely that is trivial compared to how I’ve been treated. Can you advise me please, thank you.