In addition to compensation for medical treatments, a claimant has the right to seek reimbursement for lost income.

Types of lost income

Money for the days when you could not work, and could not ask for a salary

Money for all the hours when you could not be at your workplace, because you were receiving prescribed treatment

Money for the fact that you had been forced to use any available sick leave pay or vacation pay: If you had not become injured, and forced to spend time in recovery, you could have increased the amount of your sick leave pay and your vacation pay.

What claimants must show, when seeking reimbursement of lost income?

The Personal Injury Lawyer in St John’s is of the view that the amount of time during which you were in recovery, and could not work; that might include any span of time when you were receiving physical therapy. You will need to show proof of the fact that you could have been earning money during the period of time that has been offered, as evidence of your right to the requested funds:

–For someone that held a job with an employer, that proof would come in the form of either a letter from the employer, or a pay stub, one obtained earlier.
–For someone that was self-employed, that proof would need to satisfy the demands of the defendant’s lawyer. It might be a copy of the previous year’s tax report. Alternately, it might be a copy of the relevant pages from an accountant’s books.

What if you do not resume full-time employment when you return to work?

Then your employer should arrange for you and your supervisor to keep track of the hours that you do work each week, until such time as you and your doctor feel that you are ready to resume full-time employment.

Those time sheets could be used to show the hours that you might have earned more money, if you had been an able-bodied person, instead of someone that was still undergoing a limited level of recovery.

Physicians usually work with employers, when the time has come to determine when and how a given employee should return to the workplace. Employees that do not work a full day, at first, might consult both their doctor and their supervisor, before making plans to start arriving at the workplace for a full day of work, beginning on a given date.

In such cases, it would not be wise to begin negotiations for a settlement until after the part-time employment had ended. The purpose of those part-time hours is to give the almost-recovered employee a chance to see if any new symptoms might develop, during the period of time when he or she has been working limited hours.