WRULD DB-Defendant: The Post Office

Case	Date	Court	Claimant	Task	Injury	Judgment for
Pollitt - v - The Post Office	25 May 2001	Preston County	Pollitt	Keyboard use: post code entry	Pain	Defendant

Graham Pollitt claimed damages for a work related upper limb disorder allegedly caused by carrying out a number of repetitive activities including the feeding, coding, collecting, stacking and the manual sorting of mail. This case differed from Asprey -v- The Post Office in July 1994 in that the allegedly injurious work was not confined to coding.

The Claimant's Particulars of Claim referred at various points to 'an over use injury', 'repetitive cycle injury' and 'repetitive cycle strain injury'. The report by the Claimant's original medical expert suggested that the Claimant had ".. experienced symptoms secondary to a bilateral occupationally induced cramp affecting his hands and forearms". This report also indicated that the Claimant had received Industrial Injury Benefit for Prescribed Disease A4 from in or around January 1991. At trial, the Claimant called a different medical expert who described the Claimant as suffering variously from a "chronic pain syndrome", "radial tunnel irritation", "repetitive use effects syndrome (RUES)" and "neuroplasticity".

In the Judgment of Mr Recorder McLoughlin, the Claimant was suffering from "chronic pain syndrome" but had failed to establish negligence and/or breach of statutory duty. There was no reference in the Judgment to the DSE Regulations which post-dated the allegedly injurious work.

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Last updated: 27/03/2014