It’s possible you may have heard the argument that goes along the lines of ‘accidents happen, why bother following them up?’ when it comes to injuries such as whiplash and other car related injuries. This view could be rather dangerous when it comes to whiplash and claiming for whiplash. Not to mention the justice served in returning a blameless person’s money to them which has been spent on physiotherapy and loss of work due to a whiplash injury, claiming for whiplash actually serves another purpose. Much as laws act as deterrents for certain crimes, the law punishing individuals accordingly who break the law, claiming for whiplash partly acts as a deterrent for reckless and negligent driving. If dangerous drivers are aware that they will probably pay increased insurance premium for their own mistakes, then they might be more likely to slow down.
Of course, some accidents are just that: accidents. This is where nobody can be blamed. Most UK car accidents, however, are caused by an individual not exercising the appropriate care on the road. It is easy to assess whether you have been the victim of negligent driving by asking yourself these three questions about the accident:
- Were you driving correctly?
- Did you try to pre-empt the accident?
- Do you think the accident could easily have been prevented?
If you answer one or more of these questions as ‘yes’ then it is most likely that you are not culpable and have been the victim of dangerous driving. If you were driving correctly and responsibly, then you cannot have been responsible for the accident. If you saw the accident waiting to happen and tried to prevent it, then it is likely you noticed that whoever caused the accident was driving dangerously before the accident even happened. If you think the accident could have been easily prevented if the driver had been more careful, then it is likely that the accident is their fault.
Claiming for whiplash or any injuries sustained in an accident like this will allow you to pay for any medical charges and any work or pay lost as a result of the accident. However, as well as these justified compensations, there lies a certain responsibility to prevent drivers from driving negligently again. Every time a successful compensation claim is made, a warning that driving dangerously on the roads will result in compensation goes out to anybody who does not take car safety seriously.
Everyday dangerous drivers cause accidents resulting in whiplash and more serious injuries and it is up to those individuals who have suffered an injury to think about how claiming for whiplash not only will affect them personally, but how it will begin to work towards preventing these type of injuries from happening again.
Victoria Haywood from Sussex was unsure about making a claim, ‘I didn’t know whether claiming for whiplash caused by another driver would be the right thing to do. Although I knew that the accident had not been my fault and that I had suffered a whiplash because of somebody else’s mistake, I felt a bit bad, I suppose, about claiming for whiplash. This made it very difficult for me to afford my physiotherapy sessions. I also lost out on a lot of work and money, being a freelance architectural planner. I couldn’t visit sites or meet with clients properly on a regular basis. I remember I spoke to my friends about these problems and it was them who insisted that I was being silly about not making a claim. One friend even pointed out that even if I didn’t want the compensation money to pay for the financial losses which had been caused by the crash, I should still go ahead claiming for my whiplash as a preventative measure. They said that the driver should know what the consequences of their actions were.’
The advice of her friends really hit home with Victoria and she decided to go ahead claiming for the whiplash she had suffered from the car collision. She was successful with her claim and reported that she felt she had done the right thing in the end.
