One of my favourite TV programmes at the moment is 24 Hours in A&E, a real-life documentary set in the emergency department at Queen's Medical Centre in Nottingham.

Many of the patients I can envisage as future clients made me think about whether there is a personal injury claim to cover every hour of the day.

So here goes:

• 1 am – Mr A has gone to the toilet in his local pub. Unfortunately, the floor is soaking wet and slippery; he falls and breaks his ankle;
• 2 am – Ms B heads onto the crowded dance floor for a boogie, but her stiletto heel breaks; she falls and lands on broken glass, slicing into her hand and through the tendons;
• 3 am – Mr C starts an earnest (drunken) conversation with the nightclub bouncer who simply wants him out of the way, pushing him down the stairs. Mr C sustains serious head injuries;
• 4 am – Mrs D is a care home worker. One of her charges buzzes for help getting out of bed to go to the toilet. As Mrs D assists, her elderly and overweight client loses balance, falling on Mrs D and injuring her back;
• 5 am – Mr E works at the printing press. Under pressure to get the papers out for delivery, he overrides the safety features to fix the press without shutting it down. He loses a finger in the roller mechanism.
• 6 am – Mr F is out for his morning jog and crosses a plastic plate put over the trench in the pavement where cables are being laid. The plate falls into the trench, and Mr F breaks his wrist as he falls.
• 7 am – Mr G, the milkman, slips on a patch of ice caused by the leaking overflow pipe of his customer's house. As he falls, the milk bottles he is carrying break, causing serious lacerations to his hands, arms and legs.
• 8 am – Mrs H and her 3 children jump into the car to head to school, but on the way a van emerges from a side road into the side of their car, pushing them into the oncoming traffic, which turns the car over and into a ditch. All 4 suffer significant injuries;
• 9 am – Miss I arrives at work, parks, and falls into a pothole as she crosses the carpark, snapping her achilles tendon.
• 10 am - Mr J, standing at the edge of a trench on a construction site, is hit from behind by a reversing forklift truck, pushing him into the trench, causing multiple internal injuries;
• 11 am – Master K climbs up the slide at playtime and is pushed off the top by another pupil because there is no supervisor on the playground. He fractures his elbow;
• 12 noon – Mrs L is carrying her tray of food to the table in the self-service restaurant when she slips on some spilt soup, falling backwards and banging her head on the table behind her;
• 1 pm – Mr M eats some undercooked pork in the café. He won't feel the effects for several hours yet, but after a spell in hospital, he will be diagnosed with salmonella.
• 2 pm – Mrs N reaches for the top shelf in the supermarket, only to have a cascade of tins roll off the shelf onto her feet, fracturing bones in one foot and breaking her toe on the other;
• 3 pm – Miss O gets off the school bus and, as she turns to wave to her friends, is hit on the head with the bus wing mirror, sustaining a catastrophic brain injury
• 4 pm – Mr P starts unloading his truck. As he steps into the cargo section, the load shifts, cascading down on him and pushing him off the tailgate to the ground, fracturing his pelvis;
• 5 pm – Mr Q doesn't know it yet, but that breathlessness he is feeling will shortly be diagnosed as asbestosis, after years inhaling it in his job at the shipyard;
• 6 pm – Ms R is asked by her boss to change the fat in the fryer ahead of the evening rush. Unbeknownst to her, the old fat is still hot, spills and causes extensive burns to her hands and arms;
• 7 pm – Mr S jumps in the shower at the gym. He inhales the legionella virus because the water has been kept at the wrong temperature for too long. He contracts legionnaires' disease and spends 3 weeks in intensive care;
• 8 pm – Mrs T goes along to the local fireworks display. She is a little concerned about how close the spectators are to the fireworks but assumes that the organisers know what they're doing. A firework misfires and hits her in the eye, causing a complete loss of vision in that eye;
• 9 pm – Mr U comes out of A&E where he has spent several hours after hitting his head at home. He has been given the all clear but will shortly suffer life-changing injuries due to the hospital's failure to spot the sub-dural haematoma building in his skull;
• 10 pm - Mr and Mrs V are enjoying the latest release at their local cinema when the ceiling collapses on them and the other moviegoers. They suffer superficial cuts and bruising, but both are very shocked, and Mrs V goes on to develop what is later diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder;
• 11 pm – Mr W is driving his HGV along the motorway when, too late, he sees a dark shape up ahead. Only after the collision does he realise he has hit a cow. He sustains a fracture to his sternum from hitting the steering wheel.
• 12 midnight – Miss Y is at a concert enjoying her favourite band with friends. A feedback screech from the speaker next to her causes acoustic shock, permanently damaging her hearing.

Whilst some facts have been changed, and I can't guarantee that the real accidents happened at the times allocated to them, these are all very genuine scenarios, resulting in a variety of injuries from the relatively minor to the most serious.

If you have spent a spell in A&E with injuries caused through someone else's fault, call our friendly team at Malcolm C Foy for a no-obligation chat.