At Mirage Landscaping in Calgary, we work hard to run the premier commercial and residential landscaping design and maintenance firm in the city three seasons of the year, and be your best snow removal company in the winter. We run a professional business, which means we not only carry workers compensation insurance for our employees in case they get injured on the job, but we are bonded and insured against accidental damage to your property in the course of our work.
The Scope of Slip and Fall Claims in Canada
We’re just like our responsible commercial and residential clients — we are proactive in managing our risk so that insurance premiums do not become a burden upon our operating budget. Admittedly, living in Calgary presents some extreme winter weather based challenges to the goal of injury prevention. When dealing with snow and ice is the bulk of our business in the winter, we are not only out there driving in extremely sketchy conditions to clear your parking lots and drives, we getting out there and working hard in those conditions, too. We put in that work for smart clients of ours, who use our snow removal services to limit their risk of winter slip and fall injuries.
Savvy insurance consumers realize that claims experience highly influences not only their monthly premium bill, but even their basic access to affordable liability insurance. In Canada, in excess of $3 billion in slip and fall injury claims are paid out annually. Slip and fall accidents trail only automobile accidents as a source of third party liability claims, and average settlements or court awards averaging in excess of $22,000 per incident.
In addition to third party liability, some 60,000 Canadians workers suffer slip and fall injuries annually, constituting over 15 per cent of the national workers compensation caseload. Given these statistics, the choice to have professionally performed snow and ice removal contracted out to a firm like Mirage Landscaping of Calgary becomes preventative money well spent.
Granted, not all of the slip and fall cases in the courts or administrative law settings in the province are the result of winter ice and snow, but both commercial and residential property know that even if outdoor winter slip and falls account for only a fourth of the claims, the vast majority of them are preventable.
How Our Elderly Population is Most at Risk From Falls
It is said that word of mouth is the best form of advertising. One of the axioms of marketing is that negative experiences travel further and faster than do positive ones. If you own a storefront or services business with its own parking and exterior walk ups, you are especially exposed to not only actual slip and fall accidents in winter, but to tales of near misses too. You never want to be in the entirely preventable situation of dealing with real bodily harm done to one of your customers or employees, nor do you want a story circulating about how a loved one almost broke their neck in your parking lot and decided to get back in their car. If your place of business gains a reputation of being “dangerous” to visit, especially among the elderly, it will be difficult to shake that perception.
Falls are fully responsible for more than half of all annual injuries to the Canadian elderly. The incidence of death from falling injuries is closely linked to advancing age, with about 20 per cent of all deaths among the elderly being traced back to injuries sustained in a fall. Injuries occurring during a fall also account for about 40 per cent of all nursing home admissions. One in five seniors who break a hip during a fall will eventually die within a year of the accident.
To ease your mind, most of the fall injuries to the elderly in fact occur within the home or a residential care setting. Nevertheless, Canada’s population is getting older, and none of us gain cat-like reflexes as we age. Every winter, without the spot-on management of the snow and ice on your commercial or residential property, you are running an increased risk of encountering an aging or fragile visitor, passerby, customer, or long time employee, slipping and falling upon your property, possibly resulting in a very expensive, and potentially tragic outcome.
Call Mirage Landscaping for a free quote on snow and ice removal in the Calgary area. The peace of mind you obtain could be worth more than money itself.