Pharmacy manager crash survivor fronts injury compensation campaign
A pharmacy manager who survived a car crash is fronting a new injury compensation video campaign sharing why people need financial support to get their lives back to normal.
Rusty Brown had his right leg amputated a week after a car accident caused by a driver on the wrong side of the road doing 106mph in a 60mph zone, who hit Brown’s car sending his steering column through his leg.
After the crash on August 17, 2017, Brown sought compensation and shared in a video detailing his story how the “other insurance company were basically suggesting that it was nothing to do with them, which for the first year made things very, very difficult because there was the danger that actually I wasn’t going to get any compensation”.
The video is from the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers (APIL) campaign ‘Rebuilding Shattered Lives’. President Kim Harrison says it’s part of “ongoing work to shift the mainstream media focus away from the damaging suggestion that compensation is a windfall” and help victims “obtain some redress for what they have suffered”.
“Not about the money”
Pharmacy manager Brown, 51, has worked at Merali Pharmacy in Portsmouth for around 30 years and is a keen rambler, having scaled Ben Nevis back in 2012.
He told C+D he got involved in the campaign after his solicitor said his story “would be useful to get people to have a better understanding of what going to a solicitor, and why going through a case like this is not necessarily about the money”.
Working with his solicitor, Brown says he had a positive experience in getting the compensation he deserved overall, but said “there was a misconception, even among friends” about what the money he received was used for, as people thought “it’s like winning the lottery”.
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“People don’t understand the money is spent to get your life back to where you were,” he adds.
After an NHS prosthetic leg gave Brown “excruciating” pain, his solicitor arranged “an interim payment” which helped get a private prosthetic be fitted. “It was like chalk and cheese,” he said. “The mobility was fantastic. I can’t explain the difference it made.”
Improving his quality of life
Even after this, the case took three years to reach a final settlement, and it involved buying prosthetic legs, moving house, and adapting his car.
“Because I've gone privately, I've got five prosthetics because they're all for different purposes, and some of them, you wouldn't believe the price. One of them I've got cost me £75,000. It sounds a lot of money, but it's only one leg.”
Brown moved out of his two-bedroom terrace because he wouldn’t have been able to move around and there would be “no quality of life there”.
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“You’ve got to find a house, you've got to buy it, you've then got to move into it, and then you've got to get it ready for your needs. So obviously, you can imagine that's quite a lot of money.”
“It's not the kind of windfall where you just go out and buy a Ferrari.”
Brown’s solicitor also had to secure money for loss of earnings from his job at the pharmacy, with him going down to “three and a half days a week because if I don't, I'm very tired at the weekend and again, there's no quality of life”.
Community pharmacy is “very rewarding”
But he reflects fondly on his career and how pharmacies “can make a difference”.
“We're in a very small community pharmacy. I know a lot by first name. It's nice because you speak to people, you can have a thorough chat with them and help them, and they're thankful for that. So it is very rewarding.”
He’s also thankful for how the compensation has helped him to continue work as “if I hadn’t been able to make the claim, I would still be on an NHS limb, and I wouldn’t have been able to work”.
Brown is looking forward to continuing his walking adventures, having already hiked up Ben Nevis again in 2021 after his amputation.
“That was one of my goals when I unfortunately had to have the leg amputated. And I'm looking to do Snowden in the next couple of years.”
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