Personal Injury - Far From A Medical Term
If you think about it, "personal injury" is a strange way to describe an injury
. Certainly, no doctor or medical professional would ever refer to a broken leg as a "personal" injury - it's just an injury. So where does the term come from? The law.A "personal injury" is a legal term, broadly defined in opposition to injury to property. Unlike the medical definition of the word injury, this term covers damage to more than just the body - it also includes emotional and mental damage.
Most commonly the term is used to refer to a legal case where the plaintiff alleges that they have been injured due to the negligence of another - basically, where it wasn't because the defendant failed to fulfil contractual obligations or caused harm through criminal action. Those cases are covered by a separate aspect of common law.
Effectively, personal injury claims are made to get compensation for the plaintiff, in cases where someone can be found to be liable. As you might imagine, car accidents are the most common type of personal injury London alone saw 5,164 people killed or seriously injured in 2003 (the latest data set available from the office for national statistics) - England as a whole saw 32,296 such casualties. In this kind of case, a significant number of seriously injured survivors or even the surviving family members of those deceased could make a claim.
Why a "significant number" and not "all"?
Well, in some accidents no one is to blame. If someone were to slip and fall into traffic for example, then there would be no grounds for a personal injury claim. In other cases, the harm may have been deliberate - which makes it a criminal case, something that the police would prosecute. This can also happen if it can be proved that there has been gross negligence - like someone who knowingly drove around without working brakes.
Anyway, road accidents aren't the only type of personal injury. They're just the most immediate and the most common. You can claim for a countless number of physical and psychological illnesses, from the immediate to the cumulative. For example, many people have made personal injury claims over industrial diseases contracted by exposure to asbestos. Others have made psychological personal claims over workplace stress, discrimination or harassment.
Realistically it would take far, far, far too long to write an exhaustive list of the injuries that can lead to claims for compensation.
In short, in order to make a successful personal injury claim then there must be one or more parties to blame for the injury; The other party(ies) have to have neglected their "duty of care" (their responsibility for the actions, such as the duty of care not to drive dangerously) towards you; and the accident/injury/etc has to have occurred in the past three years.
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