If You're Injured - Make Sure You Report It
Failing on a technicality
We took a call on a Sunday morning [we were being tested to see if we really were open over the weekend] from a soldier based at Catterick asking for advice on an AFCS claim he had made directly with Veterans UK.
We didn't go into the virtues of why he should have come to us in the first place, but his story of being injured whilst on exercise in another country is one that we are very familiar with and have advised on many times. He recalls telling his SNCO about the injury, and he was seen by a Medic, but he didn’t ask if a Mod F510 was going to be completed and, unbeknown to him, the incident [and his injury] was not officially recorded by anyone.
11 months later, whilst still recovering from his injury, he decided to make an AFCS application. 4 months after submitting his claim he received a letter from Veterans UK stating that his medical records had no entries relating to his injury whilst on that exercise.
This ‘administrative error’ of failing to report the injury placed the soldier in a position where the onus was now on him to provide the evidence to support his application to Veterans UK. He was given just the standard 3 months window of time to submit it and if he failed to do so Veterans UK would regard his claim as never having been made. This would place him back at the very beginning of the process.
What this soldier needed was someone to provide an ‘Executive Factual Report’ – a method of securing evidence from an officer who was present at the incident and is able to verify the soldier’s account of what had happened – but he had no idea where to start in acquiring one or who to ask. Despite his best efforts he was unable to locate anyone who could provide this evidence and his 3-month time limit quickly elapsed.
His claim failed on the technicality that he was out of time and unable to provide the necessary evidence.
The moral of this story is this: if you suffer an injury, whether in the UK or on exercise/deployment overseas, it is essential that you make sure it is recorded and that all the necessary paperwork is completed.
Veterans UK are, sadly, not in the business of giving servicemen and women the benefit of the doubt in situations like these and so the onus is on you to make sure that you do not dive in without knowledge of the process and ruin your chances of receiving an award under the Armed Forces Compensation Scheme or War Pension Scheme.
At Military Injury we have a system in place when representing a serviceman or woman in circumstances like the one just described where we try a different approach to securing the evidence needed. There is a specific regulation that will allow an exception to this situation in relation to missing documents and finding them. Knowing this regulation and using it to your advantage is another skill you’ll need if you wish to make a claim without professional help.
The best advice is to seek advice because going it alone to avoid paying for professional help will often end only one way – in disappointment! As with most things in life – you get what you pay for and paying 20% of something is better than receiving 100% of nothing.