Works' comp: our forgotten loss!

Last week I participated in the first annual Risk Management Seminar for the Legal and Liability Risk Management Institute in Indianapolis.  This is the company for which I do my consulting.  We brought risk managers and insurance pool personnel in for three days of presentations.  I did two sessions.  The first dealt with auditing special operations units and the second addressed how IA/OPS operations can predict the health of a police agency.

A surprisingly interesting presentation was done by Mark Filburn, KY League of Cities, concerning law enforcement workers’ compensation.  It’s the cause of more insurance loss than excessive force claims.  Unfortunately, we don’t spend enough time or attention to workers’ comp.  Consider the loss of personnel time and the overtime necessary to overcome this loss. 

I was surprised to find out that the 5 most common instances of workers’ comp in law enforcement were slip/fall not involving arrests, training injuries, motor vehicle accidents mostly during backups, strains during foot pursuits, and injuries related to arrest incidents.

Mark demonstrated the significant importance of using a safety officer during all training practical programs, not just those on the firing range. In slip/fall cases one thing that could assist in reducing the occurrences is wearing better shoes.  Shoes with a good griping sole and ankle supports.  Wearing seat belts and controlling backups would significantly reduce injuries in vehicle accidents.

I don’t think we pay enough attention to the workers’ comp issue in law enforcement.  We simply allow the officers to write out their injury reports and sometimes a supervisor has to lay another one on top of that.  But rarely is there a reasonable investigation done to validate the injury and the job relationship.  Then when the employee is off they’re often forgotten after a couple of weeks.  Not feeling loved or appreciated, the employee just looks for a way out and some extra money and, hopefully, good medical coverage.

What might be a reasonable answer is to expand the focus on what we now use for fleet safety and shootings.  We do a pretty good job evaluating whether the traffic accident was preventable and then what was necessary to remediate the employee.  We do a good job similarly with officer involved shootings.

What if we expanded that concept of the safety committee to include worker’s comp injuries and other uses of force?  Require this committee to designate a buddy for the injured employee to maintain continuous contact.  That might help the employee feel loved and want to come back to work even earlier.  It seems like an easy win-win!  We should be able to get some valuable information to reduce our overall losses from workers’ comp injuries on top of that.