KNOW YOUR RIGHTS: HELPING YOUR WORKERS’ COMPENSATION CASE
By Henry C. Davis, Esquire

            While workers compensation is available whenever you are injured at work, regardless of who was at fault and regardless of how long you worked there, there are some things you can fail to do that can cause you to lose your benefits that have nothing to do with if you have a legal claim for benefits. Please consider the following:

1. If you are hurt at work or develop pain associated with a specific work activity and require treatment, it is essential to make a record of the events leading up to the problem and specific symptoms you have to avoid giving the insurance company and excuse to avoid their responsibility to pay the claim for workers compensation. First you MUST tell your employer. It is best if you confirm telling the employer by sending a letter to the employer and keeping a copy. You need to specify how you got hurt or what you were doing that brought on the pain.
2. You should also advise the employer the doctor you choose to have the injury evaluated and treated. You have the absolute right in Delaware to choose your treating doctor.
3. You MUST be very clear about when and how your injury came about. Family doctors do not document this well most of the time unless you are very clear to them about how it happened. Doctors engaged by the employer to examine you and/or treat you are unlikely to be very concerned about making plain in their records how the injury happened since the employer most of the time would like it to go away. If you are unclear, or the doctor does not write down what you tell them about the injury, explain that it happened at work and there may be people who examine the records later to see what you told them so you want it clearly in the doctor’s records. Ask to see what the doctor writes or listen to what he or she dictates to the recorder to be sure they got it right. This is an aggravation for you and for the doctor, but it is important.
4. Insurance company attorneys love to find inconsistencies in records that they ought to know are nothing more than poor transcription or poor reporting, but will insist they are proof of not only inconsistent statements, but even claims of injury made up after the fact. So, do everything possible to make sure that your medical records are clear.