Income Protection For Hydraulic Engineers

This is the single most important fact in the trade and it is worth stating plainly, because the mistake it causes is going home instead of to hospital.

At working pressures, fluid escaping through a pinhole in a hose or fitting forms a jet that can penetrate intact skin without any obvious wound. The entry point may be a small mark on a fingertip with minimal bleeding and little immediate pain. The oil is then inside the tissue, where it causes swelling, chemical damage and infection over the following hours, and the recognised treatment is urgent surgical exploration and debridement. Delay is what leads to amputation.

The practical consequence for anybody in this trade is to treat any suspected injection as an emergency and say what happened on arrival. For insurance, the relevance is that this produces long absences and sometimes permanent hand impairment from an injury that looked like a scratch, which is exactly the sort of event income protection and critical illness cover exist for.

The second hazard in hydraulics is that the system holds energy after the power is off, which separates it from most electrical and mechanical work.

An accumulator stays charged, and a load held up by a ram stays up only while the system holds it. Depressurising properly and mechanically supporting anything that could fall are the controls, and they are what makes the difference between routine work and a crush injury.

That is a matter for training and method rather than for us. The insurance point is simply that the serious injuries in this trade are crush and injection rather than the cuts and strains that dominate most mechanical trades, and they produce longer absences, which is worth bearing in mind when choosing a deferred period and a benefit level.

Engineers employed by dealers or manufacturers may have death in service; self-employed mobile engineers have none.

The mobile side is where the money often is, because callout work pays well, and it is also where there is nothing behind the household at all.

So the sum worth covering is the mortgage, van and tooling finance, and the years of income a household would need, measured against what callout work genuinely earns rather than a basic rate.

The characteristic serious outcome here is permanent loss of function or part of a finger or hand, from injection or crush.

That is a specific and permanent impairment in somebody otherwise healthy, and it rules out the precise work the trade is paid for while leaving plenty of other work available on less money.

Whether a policy pays on that depends on what it lists and how it defines loss of use, which varies and is worth reading rather than assuming. We would go through the wording with you. Where it does respond, the lump sum funds retraining or a move into technical sales, service management or workshop supervision.