Using Technology to Enhance Your Reports

Using Technology to Enhance Your Reports

July 31, 2014

I have been experimenting with improving the quality of my reports in a variety of ways.

Example, if I come across a reference to a physical condition that appears unusual in the documentation I go to some for a total saw such as WikiLeaks (don’t laugh) and cut-and-paste a sentence or two about the condition. I do that in part because it is very embarrassing when you have made reference to the condition in court and you are asked about it and you plead ignorance.

I have also been making use of the Internet when illustrating surgical appliances that people have have to use e.g. a Philadelphia collar. I think it gives a much more graphic sense of what the claimant has had to endure when you can show the type of apparatus they may have had to wear.

Some of these appliances look like instruments of torture. For example look at this illustration of an external fixateur.

I have also found it very useful to understand the use and misuse of equipment that might have led to workers suffering work injuries.

Often workers talk about different sorts of machines and I have no real picture of them in my mind. I saw a roof tiler recently who had complained that safety rails had not been fitted around the house he was working on and he had fallen, landing heavily and was severely disabled. I got this image from Google images and put it in the report.

I find it especially valuable when writing reports about transport accidents. You are usually given the location of the accident although sometimes that is incorrect but you have little sense of what actually occurred. This is an extract from a recent report.

The accident that led to this claim occurred at 7.50 pm on Thursday 7 February 2013 at the intersection of Miller Street and St George’s Road, Fitzroy North. She was planning to meet friends for dinner in Preston. She had intended getting a train but was running late and chose to go by taxi instead.

She was a back seat passenger seated behind the driver wearing a seatbelt in a taxi travelling along St George’s Road at approximately fifty kilometres per hour. She was leaning forward to send a text message and her seatbelt was loose when another vehicle pulled out from Miller Street (where the white vehicle is visible in the photograph) and collided with the taxi on the left front  door (the taxi was located near the “keep clear” sign on the road). She said she looked up and saw the car coming at them. According to the ambulance report there was no cabin intrusion.

I think this gave me extra understanding of what had happened in the accident. I encourage you to be more creative in your use of these type of images to enhance your reports.

The Techo’s will know how to do this. Somebody showed me step-by-step.

Step 1 open Google Earth,  type in the location. step 2 Then go to  ground view and get the best  picture you can of the same. step 3 Press Alt and Print Screen together. step 4 Then use  Microsoft paint (you find this by clicking the Microsoft button on your screen, go to All programs–to Accessories where you will see Paint. Open that.  step 5 Click paste where you will see the  screenshot of  Google Earth. step 6 Then use Crop in the Paint program to select the Image you need, step 7 then press copy, step 8 Open a word document and position your cursor on the page and then click paste.. You will then have the image in the word document as above. step 9 If you click on the image  you will see arrows at each corner and you can use those to resize the photograph. Step 10 go to Page layout in Word, click the image  and then click Wrap, to have the text flow around the picture. Good luck.

 

 

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