It is a good practice to keep in mind that nothing is inherently safe. The good side of organizations such as the Consumer Product Safety Commission has been the establishment of legislation and corporate practice to continually make safer products for everyone with specialized care going into the design, materials and manufacture of children’s products. Still, thousands of children are injured each year by consumer products. Here is what to do if your child has been injured by a faulty product.
Take Pictures and Keep the Faulty Product
Do not throw away any piece of a product that has resulted in an injury. It is important to keep everything. Obviously, the first step when your child is injured is to immediately get appropriate medical care, but then document in video and pictures the facts of the incident. Do not rely on memory recall. You should demonstrate what was going on immediately prior to the product fault, what happened, and what the result was. This helps establish that the product failed under normal usage conditions so that a counterclaim of it only failing by being misused cannot be raised.
Document Injuries
The medical team treating your child can document the extent of the injuries in photographs as well as preparing a detailed report. If the doctor’s office or hospital does not have protocols in place to provide this, then taking clear and detailed images with your cell phone camera is the next best thing. This does more than just document an injury to a child caused by a faulty product for the purposes of insurance claims or litigation. It can also be extremely useful to the engineers who designed the product to be able to initiate a recall and correct the flaw to prevent future injuries to other children.
Personal Injury Claims
Any product can fail. However, injuries caused by poor design, lack of safety features, user manuals that are unclear, deficient raw materials, improper manufacturing, and more are reasons to hold the manufacturer accountable for the injury. Professionals, like those at Spesia & Ayers Attorneys At Law, know that documenting the details of what happened is very helpful if the injury to your child is serious. Especially when it means that it might require pursuing litigation to recover damages. Even if the injury is minor, the details should be reported.
Report Faulty Products and Injuries
The Consumer Product Safety Commission has a website where you can file a report about an unsafe product. If you have retained an attorney to pursue your rights under law due to an injury caused to your child by a faulty product, you should consult with your attorney before filing your official report. If the injury was a minor one, then you should still take the time to file the report. Manufacturers need to be aware of any injuries that could be associated with the use of their products. This helps in the design of the next generation of products to be safer.
Be sure to read every word of every user manual that comes with every product you put into use, whether it be for you or your child. Nearly every product comes with some sort of warning or cautions about its intended use, maintenance, limits of use, and possibility for harm or injury if misused. It is your responsibility to be aware of these things. Some injuries to children can be prevented by simply following the directions that come with products purchased to be used by, around or for children.
