What Happens If Your Nanny Is Injured On the Job?

It is usually something ordinary. Wet stairs. A back strained lifting a toddler who did not want to be lifted. A cut in a kitchen.

What happens next has very little to do with the injury and almost everything to do with a decision made before it: **who the employer was.**

**General information, not legal advice.** WorkSafeBC is the authority in British Columbia and should be contacted directly on any real situation.

If the caregiver is an agency employee

The agency is the employer. The injury is reported through the agency's arrangements, wage replacement and medical costs run through the workers' compensation system the employer participates in, and the household is not the party responsible for those obligations.

For the family, the practical consequence is that the arrangement continues — the agency's problem is finding a replacement, not yours.

If the family is the employer

This is the direct-hire and, commonly, the marketplace situation.

Then the family is the party with employer obligations. Whether workers' compensation coverage applies depends on whether it was in place and on the specifics of the arrangement — and if it was not, the exposure does not disappear. It just has nowhere to go except the household.

Families in this position sometimes assume home insurance will absorb it. Home policies are generally written for visitors rather than employees, and many address domestic workers specifically. That is a question for your insurer, in advance.

The practical things families get wrong

**Assuming it cannot happen.** In-home care involves lifting children, stairs, kitchens, bathrooms and floors that get wet. It is physical work.

**Assuming an introduction implies coverage.** A platform that connects you to a caregiver is generally not the employer. The introduction does not carry coverage with it.

**Not asking until afterwards.** The question costs nothing before and is expensive after.

**Treating a first-aid incident as nothing.** A minor injury that later turns into something is much harder to deal with if it was never reported at the time. Whoever the employer is should record it.

What to do now, before it is relevant

1. **Establish who the employer of record is.** If nobody can answer clearly, it is probably the household.

2. **Ask WorkSafeBC** whether coverage is required for your arrangement. They will tell you.

3. **Ask your home insurer** whether your policy contemplates a domestic employee.

4. **Agree how incidents get reported**, including small ones.

Where Puffin sits