Working in restaurants can be everything from a part-time job to an exciting and fast-paced career depending on your dedication to cooking. Unfortunately, kitchens are tightly-packed places filled with countless dangers. Sharp knives, wet floors, and hot stoves and pans all come together in what should rightly be a death trap.
In the restaurant business, little burns are like little badges of honor to show you’ve been through the battlefield of the kitchen, but bigger burns are a different story. Burning your entire arm or half your leg because someone spilled hot oil or a pot of boiling water could mean incredible pain and even long-term disability.
Scald burns classify as burns that are caused from hot liquids. These differ from regular burns as they are not often contained to small areas. Hot liquid spreads and continues to burn so it can cause huge amounts of damage in a little amount of time. Any liquid can classify as a scald burn-causing liquid. Everything from coffee, water, oil, or soup stock can cause a scald burn as long as it is over the boiling point.
Classifying Scald Burns
Like with your typical burns, scald burns can have varying degrees of severity that range from minor to life-threatening. Like regular burns, they are separated into three categories:
- First Degree – This can cause swelling and redness to the outer layers of the skin
- Second Degree – Burns extend deeper into the skin resulting in blisters
- Third Degree – The burns completely destroy skin and damage the tissues and possibly the organs underneath
As commercial kitchen scald burns frequently involve oil and other viscous substances, the burns are often much worse since thicker liquids stick to skin.
Treating Scald Burns
No injury can wait in a commercial kitchen. One small cut could mean a dozen meals of contaminated food, but scald burns are especially important to treat right away. Since they are so excessively painful, unlike a cut, you won’t find many chefs putting it off either. The first step you should take is to run cool water over the afflicted area as well as to remove any clothing where the heat might be clinging to. Even for burns as small as a hand, you should still go to a doctor right away. With quick treatment by medical professionals, it can prevent the burn from progressing, growing worse, or even getting infected.
By moving quickly to seek treatment, it can also prevent permanent disability and disfigurement. However, you will still be faced with a long and painful recovery time. While you might be able to return to the kitchen some day, you still deserve compensation for injuries that happen at work. If your scald burn happened in a commercial kitchen, you can and should get worker’s compensation for your injuries. This can help assure the safety of your job as well as cover lost wages and medical bills.
For some reason, a lot of restaurant workers think worker’s compensation is for construction workers and other labor professions, but every single employer has to have it, and that include whoever owns the restaurant that you work in. You would be surprised how many kitchen workers don’t undergo proper training and how many kitchens don’t even have proper safety standards in place, both of which are crucial in avoiding accidents. This means if they try to argue against worker’s compensation, they likely don’t have a safe leg to stand on.
If you have suffered a major burn in a commercial kitchen and need the worker’s compensation to cover the lost wages and medical bills for your injury, contact us today.