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Injury victim, expenses claim, medication, accident compensation and the need to ensure that you claim for everything possible after being injured in a serious accident
Personal Expenses
Clothing
This is written from a male perspective as this is where our experiences lie. If you are female then I hope the style of writing will enable you to transfer the ideas into your own needs for your gender.
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victim support and rehabilitation.
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rehabilitation equipment.
Any Occupational Therapist will naturally consider your extra clothing needs as part of their assessment. This need will differ according to your disability. In our experience the assessment was superficial. As an amputee the Occupational Therapist only ever really considered extra trouser needs. The past expense included many other items and was inserted into the report but was still inaccurate. You must fight for inclusion of the additional items of clothing you buy. That is not only items that are new to your wardrobe but also items that are additionally bought eg if you normally buy 3 new pairs of trousers pre accident but buy 10 per year post accident the additional 7 are claimable.
The factors you need to consider for clothing will include weight gain, weight loss, change of size because of muscle wastage, change of style needed because of prosthetics eg pleated trousers so your prosthetic leg is not exposed etc, excessive sweating thereby needing increased washing of clothing, this will wear clothes out quicker. Wheelchair usage will also damage clothes.
Extra shoes because prosthetists advise buying shoes in bulk as prosthetic legs wear shoes at different rates. Trying to then find the same style one year on will not be easy. Also the prosthetic leg needs to be set and heighted to each shoe as your leg may cause usage problems on each different shoe.
Shorter coats may be needed if you are a wheelchair user or wheelchair bound. Do you require suits to return to work or for special occasions eg a funeral, wedding? Consider the need for buying extra pairs of trousers for the suit at the time of purchase. Again try finding trousers for a suit when the style has moved on. One hole in the trousers will then require the need for an entire new suit. Additionally, the claim may not find that a new suit is claimable, an extra 2 or 3 pairs of trousers might be though.
How about new belts? Do your needs require constant adjusting to clothing underneath your trousers? Belts will wear out quicker due to constant on /off adjustment needs.
Socks and underpants are another item you will constantly be replacing due to the physical wear and tear of a prosthetic leg wearing the cloth and additional washing because of sweating.
In our view and experience, you should itemise each item of clothing and consider them in turn to see where the problem lies in regard to your disability.
You must then write down exactly the problem so the Occupational Therapist and your solicitor are aware of the problem. You then MUST spend money and keep the receipts of the clothing you buy to solve the problem.
The annual spend you have eventually will be averaged out and projected into the future. This can be tens of thousands of pounds.
Do not ignore this area because if you do then so will your expert. The insurers expert will obviously not consider this in the same way.
Medication
Medication is split into two types. Prescription medication and Non-Prescription medication.
Prescription medication is just as it says, medication prescribed by your doctor. You must be aware of the costs that this incurs.
Your prescription may have information on it that is financially beneficial to you. You may be entitled to your medication free of charge. This will be dependant on your personal circumstances, so is beyond what we can comment on here. Check carefully if you are entitled to free prescription medication.
If you are not so entitled to free medication then you have the option to pre pay. People who have to pay for more than 5 prescription items in 4 months, or 14 items in 12 months, could save money by buying a pre payment certificate (PPC).
The charges vary every year. Please check the up to date cost.
See the following link: http://www.ppa.org.uk/ppa/ppc_intro.htm.
So you can see you must carefully calculate what expense you have to ensure you are financially better off. The charge is of course a claimable expense if it has arisen from your need for the medication because of the accident you had.
There are other items that can be put onto your prescription that you might not be aware of.
When your doctor writes out a prescription it need not be only for medication, It can also be for medical supplies. For example you may need an anti bacterial soap to kill bacteria that causes you great discomfort inside a prosthetic leg liner. This is a plastic covering that goes over ones stump that connects ones stump to the prosthetic leg.
Once the bacteria is eliminated the discomfort and itchiness can decrease enormously. This soap is called HiBiSCRUB an antimicrobial skin cleanser used by surgeons to clean their skin prior to operating on people.
Also available to you, as long as there is a medical need, are a whole host of other medical supplies. Your G.P has two books that he consults one for medication and the other for non- medication.
One can ask for and receive bandages, dressings and other hardware supplies. All that is necessary is for your G.P. to check they are available on prescription by checking this book.
What is not obvious until you ask your G.P. is to request non-prescription medication to be put onto your prescription.
Normally your G.P. will tell you that it is cheaper to buy non prescription medication eg paracetamol. If you are on free medication or have pre paid for the certificate then why not ask your G.P. to also put on your prescription your non-controlled medication. That will undoubtedly save you money too.
What is not so obvious in this section on medication is the fact that you will have spent large sums of money on lotions.
We refer to these as Lotions and Potions. The potions are the actual medication, the lotions cover many other soaps and creams that are necessary to keep your body in good shape.
This may not add up to much individually but remember the final figure can be substantially altered in your favour once all these smaller insignificant sums are added in. For example over a 61 months we spent £1,710.00 on lotions alone. This worked out to £340.00 pa. Over a lifetime this figure worked out to £7,140.00. This money is better in your bank account than the insurance company. When you apply this to all the other small sums you can see how the numbers multiply. One cannot tell exactly what all these small things add up to as there are too many variables.
What sort of lotions can you claim for? The simple answer is anything that is required by you to solve a problem that has been created by the accident.
As stated elsewhere one might need Simple soap, which is non-scented and has no additives, instead of the normal scented soap one normally buys. This could be an additional cost because you may still need to buy the scented soap your family, although there could be a percentage deducted as an adjustment. You may have to buy Vaseline for assisting in getting ones liner into ones prosthetic leg, talc to dry certain prosthetic items, baby Infacare to wash with and use in the bath because it is Ph neutral.
This is important to stop bacteria and stop aggravating itchiness within a prosthetic liner. One may claim for additional air freshener because the smell of the sweaty stump and ones increased sweat production may cause offence to everyone else where your body odour did not do so previously.
The downside of all the above is that you have to persuade your own legal team that the expense of the above is reasonable in the eyes of the judge. They may accuse you of being money grabbing and therefore unreasonable.
Your answer to that is one wants to claim for every expense that reasonably arose from the accident. As long as they agreed that it was a reasonable explanation of the expense then you should insist that it was put in a schedule.
You will find that pressure will be put on you to downsize the claim in the effort of appearing reasonable. Remember you are the loser so you must be strong in your belief that the expense is needed. The more convincing the need the more likely that it will go forward. Anyway when it comes to downsizing the claim this will be done at the negotiation stage come what may. It is advisable that any negotiation down should start from the highest possible figure.
Final Observations
The Occupational Therapist/ Rehabilitation report will be one of the reports to cause you the most worry and grief over. Consequently you must make sure your evidence and needs are well documented.
It is this evidence that makes it impossible for even your own experts to wriggle out from their responsibilities to you. Check all the facts that are written in both defendant and claimant reports, double check when the joint report is agreed, you can be sure any figures quoted will not be exact and certainly not in your favour.
Even if the final report and the schedules arising from them are to your approval, remember the case could fall apart in court during the trial. Any number of reports are worthless if, under cross examination, your expert changes her mind on certain aspects of your case under cross examination.
We had to make a judgement on one of our own experts as to her ability to give evidence in court. It was plainly apparent that she did not like giving evidence in court for her own personal reasons.
As far as we are concerned the benefit of her efforts were best kept to the pre trial phase and to use her report as a negotiation tool. Our efforts to maximise the amount needed for rehabilitation were satisfactory to achieve these goals. One should try and avoid having an expert that is less than happy about giving evidence in court but even the best of solicitors will have the odd expert or two slip through the net. If this happens to you then practicalities must take over.
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