You might hear the phrase “quality of life” during your personal injury case. What exactly does this term mean, and why is it important?
Your injuries affect you physically, of course, but they can also affect the way you live and how you think and feel about your life. You might feel anxious about being seen in a wheelchair. You might have lost some self-esteem because you require assistance. You might even be battling overwhelming depression.
Even though they do not have a price tag, these quality-of-life losses can be accounted for in a personal injury claim.
What Is Quality Of Life?
Quality of life can be described in many ways, including:
- Happiness
- Contentment
- Enjoyment
- Satisfaction
In other words, an injury can affect your ability to engage and take joy in your life. However, these simple words don’t come close to reflecting what’s lost when a severe injury upends your existence.
Ways Your Trauma Affects Your Quality Of Life
After an accident, you might experience a number of changes that alter your quality of life. Some examples include:
Pain
Chronic pain can make you miserable. You might not be able to find a comfortable position in which to rest or sleep or constantly worry about your pain getting worse. Pain affects what you can do and may even make you dependent on others to take care of you.
Some aspects of pain are financial in nature. For example, the expenses of medical treatment and medication are categorized as economic losses. By contrast, all the human costs, such as sleepless nights, anxiety, and disability, erode your quality of life and qualify as non-economic losses.
Suffering
You could experience mental and physical suffering after an accident. Physical suffering comes from pain, discomfort, fatigue, and all the other physically draining effects of your injuries and the treatments you endure. Mental suffering comes from worrying about your health, finances, and other effects of your injuries.
For example, you might experience anxiety from needing accommodations for your injuries, like extra time boarding an airplane. These worries can hamper your happiness and satisfaction in your mental life as much as pain hampers your physical life.
This happens more often than you might realize — as many as 55.9% of people with orthopedic injuries develop anxiety.
Disability
Your injuries will also limit what you can do. Disability can affect you mentally and financially. When your activities are limited, you can’t do the things you must do, like working, maintaining your home, and caring for your loved ones. As a result, you lose income and incur increased expenses.
Quality-of-life costs are separate from these economic costs. Disability affects your quality of life by diminishing your self-worth because you can’t support yourself financially or live independently. You’ll also lose the enjoyment you used to derive from exercising, engaging in hobbies, playing with your children, and participating in other activities.
Disfigurement
Disfigurement is when your injuries affect your appearance. You might have extensive scarring from a burn injury or a facial droop resulting from a brain injury. Your quality of life could suffer if people treat you differently because of your disfigurement. However, it could also diminish due to your worries about people treating you differently, even if no one does so.
Dismemberment
Dismemberment happens when you lose a body part, organ, or system. It encompasses all of the aforementioned quality of life issues, including:
- Permanent disability
- Disfigurement when the body part is visible
- Pain
- Mental suffering
Even if you replace the body part with a prosthetic device, you’ll never have the same quality of life you had before the injury.
Putting A Value On Quality Of Life
In Florida, you’re entitled to recover compensation for the non-economic losses you suffer due to the effects of your injuries on your quality of life. The one exception falls under the state’s no-fault insurance system for car accidents. State law only allows car accident victims to pursue compensation for quality-of-life losses when they suffer a significant, permanent injury.
Florida doesn’t prescribe a formula for calculating compensation for a reduction in quality of life. Instead, the claims adjuster or jurors will consider the severity of your injury to determine its impact on your quality of life. For example, injuries that cause permanent disability or chronic pain will affect a victim’s quality of life much more than injuries they recover from.
Similarly, injuries that more acutely impact your day-to-day life could justify greater compensation than those that only cause minor inconveniences. Thus, a broken finger won’t affect you as much as a broken leg, even though it takes roughly the same time to heal.
Recovering Compensation For Quality-Of-Life Losses
If you’ve been injured due to someone else’s negligent actions, you can pursue compensation for a reduced quality of life from your injuries with the help of our law firm Norden Leacox Accident & Injury Law. You can put a dollar value on this reduction by identifying how your injuries have altered your life. Consult a qualified attorney to learn more about the potential compensation you can seek at (407) 801-3000.