In thinking about making a personal injury claim, if your injuries were serious, you need to think about what things you need for the short term and what things you want for the long term. Just as important as defining your personal needs and desires, you should also make it your task to become informed about your rights and duties of making a personal injury claim in the UK. Until you know what you can get under the law, you won’t know if your expectations about the end-result of your claim are realistic and reasonable.
The Balinda & Co website provides all the basic information you should have about your rights and your obligations under the UK personal injury law. A number of sources, including you yourself, will provide you with other tools to help you define your needs and expectations. Identifying your goals will tell you what you wish to achieve. This website, used together perhaps with other professional advice, can then help you map out how to accomplish those goals.
Your Short-term and long-term needs
Sometimes a person’s short-term and long-term needs overlap, as they are but different versions of one central underlying concern. For example, you want and need to maintain financial stability, for yourself and for your family, both now and in the future. But how you achieve the short-term objective of preserving your financial balance may be different from how you preserve your balance over the longer term. In the midst of the great upheaval and distress you could feel over a serious personal injury, you may need to locate a suitable therapist without delay. That will be your immediate objective, with the short-term goal of getting focused professional assistance during a period of extreme pain and anxiety. Longer term, you may need to establish a new exercise or work regimen to provide you with ongoing relief from continuing stresses. Either way, you are planning for your future. It’s just that one part of the plan applies to the near future and the other part to the more distant future.
The same can pretty much be said of all the needs you identify for yourself. You will be developing concrete ideas about what to do to address those concerns now and what to do about those same or similar needs over a period of years. If you find it too hard to identify all your needs, ask someone to help you do that. Similarly, if you can’t quite figure out the best ways to set short- and long-term objectives for yourself, get someone to help you. This website, books, and discussions with friends and professionals can provide you with plenty of ideas and help you rank your priorities.
The need to keep an open mind
At the same time, you should keep an open mind. In extreme pain and distress, you might be thinking about taking your life. As you think more about your urge to commit suicide, however, you should come to see that you will hurt yourself more by holding onto the past. Playing out your anger at or disappointment with yourself will almost surely reduce the chances for recovery.
One main premise of this website is that you should be aware of all your legal entitlements when you have suffered serious injuries in an accident that was not your fault. If you focus too much on immediate compensation, you will be disserving long-term goals of your emotional stability and financial security. If you keep a cool head and plan your future life with carefully thought out objectives, you will be creating for yourself, as best you can possibly do, the kind of life that you want and deserve. You will, in short, be mapping out the best possible outcome for your personal injury claims process.
Asiimwe Balinda
Personal injury solicitor