Several factors will determine the value of your Mississippi Workers’ Compensation Injury. This article will cover “scheduled member injuries”. Scheduled member injuries in Mississippi Workers’ Compensation include hands, feet, legs, arms, and other body parts excluding back and neck injuries. The reason these injuries are referred to as “scheduled member injuries” is because there is a “schedule” for each of these body parts that gives a total amount of weeks of compensation per body part. For example, an arm injury will receive a maximum of 200 weeks of compensation.
Upon your release from care, a doctor will assign a disability rating to your injured body part. Perhaps you are assigned a 10% impairment rating to your arm. You would then multiply 200 weeks at .1 for a total of 20 weeks of compensation. That is then multiplied at 66 2/3% of your average weekly wage. Now you have the amount for permanent partial disability for that arm. If you made $400 a week then your compensation rate is $266.66 and your permanent partial disability compensation for this injury would be $5,333.28.
However, your permanent partial disability settlement can be driven higher by what is known as “industrial loss of use”. “Industrial loss of use” is a legal term within the workers’ compensation industry that refers to how the subject injury impacts your ability to perform your usual work duties. If you can no longer perform all the duties of your job, your permanent partial disability rating may go from the aforementioned 10% to 30%. Vocational experts often help in extrapolating disability percentages and work restrictions into an overall percentage for industrial loss of use.
