Part One: Travelling for Pleasure
Injuring yourself in a foreign country can be extremely frightening, and securing your compensation for such an injury can be complicated and confusing. In a situation such as this, the assistance of an experienced personal injury lawyer can make all the difference.
When you are on vacation, you are focused on enjoying yourself and hopefully not worrying too much about your health or whether you are going to injure yourself. However, as has been shown time and time again, there are so many opportunities to incur hospital bills and bodily harm when travelling. If you fail to get vaccinated for instance, and end up with some exotic disease, you could end up in the hospital and it will probably be costly. If you should fall in a hotel outside of Canada and need a doctor to set a broken bone or provide stitches, that’s going to be a pretty nasty bill. In Canada, we take or health care benefits for granted, so it’s important to remember when travelling in another country that hospital bills are extremely expensive.
Travel insurance is one way to avoid a nightmarish bill when you hurt yourself travelling. Canadian companies such as Allianz and CAA provide excellent coverage and in certain situations will even cover lost or stolen items such as jewelry or an expensive camera. Goodman Elbassiouni LLP is in the business of making sure that your finance don’t take a hit they can’t withstand, so while we don’t work in insurance or in the complex world of personally injury abroad, we certainly care enough to bring these matters to the attention of our clients.
In personal injury cases that stem from international travel (for recreation, rather than work), everything rests on jurisdiction and points of applicable law. These aren’t necessarily cases we would take on, but we’re always happy to refer our clients to someone who is well versed in these matters.
Part Two: Travelling for Work
On the other hand, if you are injured when you are travelling for work, you should be compensated under the policies of the WSIB. As always, we would encourage you to contact a workers compensation lawyer if such an injury should befall you, to make sure that you’re not getting short-changed. Because the nuances of what constitutes travelling for work are quite complicated, in a situation such as this it can be especially important to have a good lawyer on hand.
If you’re injured while driving to or from work, you are covered under WSIB unless it can be clearly demonstrated that you were running a personal errand at the time of the injury. This includes travel on public transit, or if you were in a vehicle being driven by your boss.
If you are on an overnight trip for work and your bosses are paying your expenses, you are eligible for worker’s compensation if you injure yourself in the dining room or lobby of the hotel, for example. There’s a bit of a grey area if you were having a drink in the lounge or doing something for your own personal enjoyment. If you get an emergency call from your boss and injure yourself responding to it, you are most certainly entitled to coverage.
If you are roused from bed in the middle of the night, or you have to spend time away from your family for work, you should certainly be fairly compensated in the instance of an injury. If you require the assistance of a reliable slip and fall lawyer in Toronto to help you get this compensation, Goodman Elbassiouni LLP is here for you.
