We have recovered compensation for a 5-year-old girl who was injured in a trampoline accident at a friend’s birthday party.
The birthday party included activities run by a member of staff. One of the activities was running races up and down the “Tumble Track”, a long trampoline bed.
As the little girl ran along the Tumble Track, as directed by the staff member, she tripped and fell. She landed on her outstretched arm and suffered a fracture dislocation of her arm as a result.
She had to undergo very painful treatment at hospital to correct the dislocation. She then had to have her arm in a plaster cast for several weeks. The accident happened in the summer holidays and she had been due to go on holiday with her family. The treating doctor at the hospital advised her parents that the holiday should be cancelled because of her injuries.
Even once the cast was removed the girl understandably had a real lack of confidence in her arm and her physical abilities, being worried about doing PE at school or running in case she fell and hurt her arm again.
We agreed to deal with her trampoline accident claim act on a No Win, No Fee basis.
We made enquiries with the trampoline park and submitted a formal claim form to their insurers.
The insurers denied liability for the accident, saying that there was nothing wrong with how the activity had been run and even seeking to blame the child’s mother for the accident because she had not been supervising her daughter properly. We strongly repudiated any suggestion of a failing on the mother’s part. Her daughter was taking part in an organised activity run by the park itself, so this allegation was outrageous.
We discovered that the trampoline park had a “no running” rule for the Tumble Track listed on their website. We pointed out to them that their rule was in place because running on a trampoline bed was dangerous and therefore if their employee was specifically telling children to run then this was clearly in breach of their own safety standards.
At this point the insurance company caved and conceded legal responsibility for the accident, agreeing to compensate the girl for her injury.
We arranged for her to be seen by an independent medical expert who prepared a report about the impact of the accident, including how long she was likely to take to make a full recovery. We also gathered information about the financial impact the accident had on the family, including the cost of the holiday that had to be cancelled at the last minute.
We then negotiated an out of court settlement of the trampoline accident claim.
We are trampoline accident specialists. For further information about suing a trampoline park you can read a detailed article here.
