In this country, restaurants and the staff they employ can be found everywhere. Fast food, fine dining, and everything in between make it possible to have almost any culinary experience in any city. While this is good news for diners and those seeking employment, it also means that accidents in restaurants occur quite frequently, forcing victims to seek compensation via worker’s liability insurance.
Each and every injury can end up incurring multiple costs in the form of compensation, investigation, and litigation. All these things require restaurant insurance of some kind to cover these potential costs and keep you in business.
However, with the right tools and knowledge, these costly injuries are completely preventable.
Common Injuries Sustained by Kitchen Staff
A kitchen can be full of accidents waiting to happen. Burns, cuts, slips, and fires can all end up costing both owners and staff.
Burns can happen when boiling water or oil makes contact with the skin, but they can also occur when staff members neglect to make use of protective oven gloves. Cuts can occur when dull knives being used to cut food slip and cause hand and finger injuries.
Kitchen floors are typically smooth for the purpose of making them easier to clean. However, this practical feature can turn into a significant hazard when water, oil, and other slippery substances inevitably spill during the course of a day’s work.
Fires can occur anywhere in a kitchen. From overloaded sockets to the spillage of oil onto hot burners or inside ovens, kitchens carry a risk of injury from fire.
Kitchen Safety to Prevent Injury
There are many simple steps you can take to ensure safety while working in the kitchen, whether you are staff or the owner of the establishment.
Ensuring that all boiling liquids are covered is one simple way to prevent burns. Another is to encourage the use of oven gloves by ensuring they’re placed right where they will be used, such as on oven doors. Staff should always be trained to walk as slowly as possible when carrying boiling ingredients from one station to another.
Cuts and punctures can be avoided by ensuring that all knives being used are sharpened as well as possible. A sharp knife is far less likely to slip and cause injury. Along with sharpening, you need to ensure that you’ve given the right training on proper knife usage.
Preventing slips in the kitchen is as simple as designating someone to deal with spill management. This way, spills can be addressed, and the floors cleaned and dried at the moment they occur. Another solution is to ensure that needed tools for removing spills are accessible at all times.
Having one or more stocked first aid kits in the kitchen is a good idea for treating minor burns. Prevention methods include having fully operational fire extinguishers within easy reach. To ensure all can escape should a fire get out of control, training on evacuation procedures should occur.
Getting Restaurant Insurance
Despite your best efforts, there will always be a potential for injuries in kitchens, which means that you will always need restaurant insurance.
While you should, of course, do everything we talked about above to prevent potential injuries, the right restaurant insurance can help mitigate incidents like accidents on the premises, injuries, food-related illnesses, unfulfilled expectations, and more.
There are, of course, a number of variables that could impact the type of insurance you need and the premiums you will be charged, and while it may seem like a bother, you can’t ignore its importance. This is the kind of policy and plan that can keep your business running even when the expected happens.
Ensuring that you and your employees are protected from injury is absolutely critical. Workers’ liability insurance and restaurant insurance from Tabak Insurance Agency offers several levels of protection. Find out how to get insured fast by calling us at (281) 769-5274 today to learn more.
