How to Evaluate Personal Injury and Workers Compensation Cases Involving a Degloving Injury
A Degloving Injury May Be Life-Threatening and Cause Permanent Restrictions
Our personal injury law firm represents many injured workers and motor vehicle accident (car, truck, and motorcycle) victims who have suffered a degloving injury to the hand, finger, foot, arm, leg, pelvis, and even head.
Degloving injuries are catastrophic, often resulting in permanent and total disability, and sometimes fatal.
We understand how devastating and gruesome a degloving injury can be and how the accident causing the degloved body part may result in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and associated symptoms.
This article overviews degloving injuries, including factors accident victims should consider when calculating an auto accident or workers comp settlement amount.
Keep reading for more information.
And call us at 804-251-1620 or 757-810-5614 for a free consultation about whether you have a personal injury case or workers comp claim.
What is a Degloving Injury?
A degloving injury occurs when trauma peels off all the layers of skin, much like you take a glove off your hand.
Degloving injuries that extend through the skin and deeper tissue, causing damage to nerves, muscle, fat, and blood vessels, are considered avulsion injuries.
In a degloving injury, the blood supply for the skin and soft tissues torn off gets severed.
Mechanism of Injury: Why Does Degloving Occur?
Your skin and musculoskeletal system have the following layers: skin, subcutaneous fat, superficial fascia, deep fat, deep fascia, muscle, and bone.
A degloving injury occurs when (1) an external force shears one or more of the first few layers one way and the deep fascia, muscle, and bone the other or (2) the external force shears all the layers from the bone.
The degloving destroys the skin and the layers below it, ultimately causing vascular injury and the skin to die because it is oxygen deprived.
How Severe Are Degloving Injuries?
A degloving injury is one of the most severe injuries you can suffer, with many medical and legal professionals considering them as devastating as an amputation, third-degree burn, or spinal cord injury.
Degloving injuries can turn into fatalities because of the amount of blood loss and tissue death (necrosis) accompanying these events.
In addition, the shock of seeing the degloved body part may cause long-term psychological impairment.
What Types of Accidents Cause Degloving Injuries?
Any high-energy trauma to your soft tissues (including the skin surface, tendons, ligaments, muscles, nerves, and blood vessels) may cause a degloving injury.
Common causes of degloving injuries include the following:
- Car crashes, particularly when one or more tires run over the body
- Falls from heights
- Industrial equipment (for example, your arms, hands, legs, feet, jewelry, hair, or clothing getting caught when operating heavy machinery in a manufacturing facility or on a construction site)
- Motorcycle collisions
- Pedestrian accidents
- Railroad worker accidents
However, other potential causes of degloving injuries include:
- Animal bites, particularly dog attacks
- Contact with toxic chemicals, such as those capable of causing third-degree burn injuries.
Types of Degloving Injuries
A degloving injury is either an open or closed degloving.
Open Degloving
You have suffered an open degloving injury when the trauma rips away the skin, exposing the muscles, bone, and connective tissue underneath. Sometimes the skin remains partially attached and hanging near the wound.
The most common areas of the body for open degloving injuries are the:
- Abdomen/Torso
- Face
- Legs
- Scalp
Open degloving injuries require emergency medical treatment.
Closed Degloving
While open degloving injuries are catastrophic events requiring urgent medical care, closed degloving injuries may be subtle.
In a closed degloving injury, the top layer of the skin remains intact, sometimes with only a bruise visible to the naked eye. However, the top layer (hypodermis) has separated from deeper tissue (fascia and fat) underneath.
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and CT scans can detect closed degloving injuries.
The spaces between the top layer of the skin and deeper levels are called Morel-Lavallee lesions. And these lesions may fill with lymph fluid, fat, and blood.
Treatment for a Degloving Injury
Treatment options depend on whether you have an open or closed degloving injury.
Medical Care for an Open Degloving Injury
An open degloving injury requires immediate treatment to save the skin and underlying soft tissue.
The emergency medical providers will likely transfer you to a hospital with a trauma center able to handle complex skin and wound repair.
Then, depending on the extent of the injury and the amount of skin left, the doctors may try the following:
- Reattaching the skin
- Reconstructive surgery, including skin grafts from other areas of the body and skin flaps.
- Amputation
- Reattachment of the injured digit (finger or toe)
Each of these options may require several surgeries and lengthy hospitalizations. And once you get discharged from the hospital, you will likely have to spend time in a skilled nursing facility, receive wound care, and undergo physical therapy to regain function in the degloved body part.
In addition, your doctors will monitor your wounds and prescribe prescription medication to prevent and fight bacterial infection. This complication can be as life-threatening as the degloving injury.
Further, you may need separate medical care for other injuries suffered in the trauma, such as fractures.
Medical Care for a Closed Degloving Injury
The treatment needed for closed degloving injuries is often less extensive than the care required for open degloving.
For example, compression bandages, therapy, and rest may be all you need for a minor degloving injury.
However, other closed degloving injuries require percutaneous drainage, irrigation and debridement, and sclerotherapy.
What are the Long-Term Effects of Degloving Injuries?
Unfortunately, a degloving injury often has lifelong consequences.
In addition to cosmetic defects, such as scarring and disfigurement, you will likely suffer permanent impairment of the degloved body part. This impairment may range from difficulty performing a small number of tasks you could do before the accident to the inability to use the body part for anything.
Depending on the extent of the loss of use of the degloved body part and the psychological impact the accident and injury have on you, you may never return to your pre-injury employment. Instead, you may be limited to light-duty, sedentary work.
What is the Average Settlement for a Degloving Injury Lawsuit or Workers Compensation Claim?
In my experience, the average settlement amount for a degloving injury is $150,000.00 to $600,000.00 or more.
These degloving injury settlements reflect the pain, suffering, disfigurement, extensive surgery, and permanent disability associated with avulsion injuries.
In addition, the high-energy trauma that causes a degloving injury often causes other bodily damage, such as traumatic brain injury (TBI), concussion, post-concussion syndrome, or broken bones, or secondary conditions, such as anemia from the blood loss.
The presence of other injuries and medical impairments and the treatment needed to recover from them affect the typical workers comp or car accident settlement for a degloving injury.
What to Consider When Settling a Degloving Injury Claim
Here is a list of factors you should consider when calculating the value of your degloving injury lawsuit.
Workers Comp for Degloving Injuries
Negligence has no role in workers comp.
Therefore, you will likely be eligible for workers compensation benefits for a degloving injury, so long as your violation of a known safety rule (lockout/tagout) or willful misconduct did not cause the accident.
When determining the value of your workers comp degloving claim, analyze these factors:
- The amount of temporary total disability (TTD) benefits you may receive: In all likelihood, you will never return to your pre-injury job after a degloving accident. Therefore, you should estimate the workers comp payments your state provides (usually 2/3 of your weekly pre-injury earnings for up to a set number of weeks – 500 weeks in Virginia).
- The estimated amount of permanent partial disability (PPD) payments you will get: Even if you return to a light-duty job after a degloving injury, you will still be entitled to compensation for scarring, disfigurement, and permanent loss of use of the degloved body part.
- Future medical expenses: Degloving injuries often require multiple surgeries and extensive rehabilitation. Therefore, any workers comp settlement demand for degloving injuries should include a significant amount for health care.
Personal Injury Claims for Degloving Injuries
As you can see, a degloving injury may provide multiple causes of action under tort law, including negligence claims in motor vehicle collisions and product liability lawsuits if poorly designed or defective equipment or machinery caused you harm.
Indeed, employees hurt in a workplace degloving accident may file a workers comp claim and pursue a third-party lawsuit against the negligent party if the harm resulted from a work-related car crash or machinery incident.
Although there is an overlap between what you can recover money for in workers comp and tort claims, you can generally recover more in personal injury damages for a degloving injury.
Civil actions allow you to get money for physical pain and suffering, while workers comp pays nothing for pain and diminished quality of life. And degloving injuries are excruciating, requiring extensive medical care and causing extreme pain. Therefore, you can receive significant monetary damages for the long-term pain and disability associated with a degloved body part.
Top-Rated Injury Lawyers to Help You Recover After a Degloving Injury
Degloving injuries are common work accidents, particularly in the manufacturing, construction, maritime, and railroad industries, and frequent results of motor vehicle collisions.
Focus on healing.
And let our attorneys fight for a fair settlement for your degloving injury.
In addition, we will evaluate your eligibility for Social Security Disability benefits due to the long-term effects of the degloving injury.
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