Personal Injury Lawyers are familiar with hospitals. Visiting the hospital in order to see an innocent accident victim to conduct a consultation and explain to them their rights is part of the job as a personal injury lawyer. As such, personal injury lawyers get to know the ins and outs and routines at many hospitals. We also see some pretty weird stuff at hospital as well. And these weird occurrences are through no fault of the people hospitalized. It just so happens that hospital can be very strange places. How so you might ask?
For starters, there are no barriers to entry at the hospital. Every Canadian has free healthcare. You don’t have to pay, or pass security in order to get inside of a hospital. As such, you might have people wandering the hallways looking for shelter, a warm bed, pills to steal, supplies like sheets or pillows, or people looking to scam patients who are not at their best. As a personal injury lawyer, I’ve had many clients tell me that while they are staying at hospital, they’ve had strangers approach their bed purporting to be a hospital worker asking for their banking information. I can assure you that hospital staff are not asking patients for their banking information. This doesn’t happen. It can however happen that people with ill intentions enter the hospital trying to defraud or steal patients. While all hospital do have some form of security, it’s never enough to monitor an entire hospital. And, by the time that people have found out that they’ve been stolen from, or defrauded, it’s too late. The focus while staying in hospital is rarely about money or security because hospitals should be (and often are) safe spaces. Rather, it’s about health, recovery, and getting home.
After you’ve been hospitalized, particularly after a car accident, it’s not uncommon for the insurance company to reach out to you, and find out where you are. This happens quite frequently. They next thing you know, a representative from the insurance company (likely a field adjuster or a third party adjuster), will be there by your bedside in the hospital; helping you complete all sorts of forms, and getting you to sign some other forms which you likely don’t understand. It’s quite incredible how many people put so much trust in insurance companies to look out for their rights during these early stages of the case when they are at their weakest and most vulnerable state.
Once the insurance company finds out where you are (and they will), you can then expect them to send out not only a field adjuster, but they will likely also send out an occupational therapist or another designated health care professional which they have chosen to get out there and see you as fast as they can. And they are very fast at getting out there to see you. It’s almost like they want to get out there to see you before you retain a personal injury lawyer and before you know your rights. There are some large health care companies which insurers commonly use. Their therapists get out quickly, and ask the injured accident victim to fill out and sign another set of forms so that they can get to work. The insurer will pay for that work out of the policy limits of the injured accident victim (accident benefits, or other private collateral benefits if available). Again, for the accident victim to put his/her trust into the hands of an insurer and their selected therapist isn’t getting the case started off on the right step (most of the times). The accident victim has the right to select the occupational therapist, chiropractor, social worker or health care professional of his/her own choosing. Why then is the accident victim going along with the suggestions of the insurance company? Are they all of the sudden blindly trusting the insurer to have their best interest and protect their rights without knowing how the system works and without having consulted with a personal injury lawyer? Has the accident victim ever worked with that particular therapist before such that they have no issue with the insurer’s selection? Is the injured accident victim familiar with the work that the therapist’s company has done in the past? Have they had the ability to research them? Likely no to all of these questions given that they are recovering from serious injuries while in hospital, and they likely aren’t at their best to make any of these decisions (which can often be very rushed).
The accident victim may have some other unexpected visitors as well. Personal injury lawyers, paralegals, or other people affiliated with personal injury law firms have a tendency of finding out where injured people are at hospital. I’ve had clients approached for legal services, completely unsolicited. It was no coincidence that they were found at hospital by these total strangers who weren’t lawyers, but who purported to work with lawyers and law firms. They wanted my clients to sign all sorts of forms in order to get their case started; not knowing that they already had already retained a personal injury lawyer and that their case was well underway. The impossible thing is that the people who are soliciting their services unannounced in hospital are rarely lawyers; so there is little that can be done to stop this sort of solicitation. There are no regulatory penalties for non lawyers, because they aren’t regulated.
Apart from the forms, let’s examine the dynamic of hospital rooms and the hospitals themselves. Hospitals are often busy places. Hospital rooms can be crowded, and busy places as well. There are nurses, doctors, residents, social workers, cleaning staff, PSWs and visitors coming in and out of hospital rooms, seemingly at all hours of the day excluding visiting hours. There are machines beeping, announcements on the intercom which don’t stop, along with people moaning and groaning in pain. Having visited a lot of hospital rooms across Ontario, I can tell you that they aren’t as peaceful as you might think or as you would want them to be.