Bedbug Lawsuits Seeing a Dramatic Increase: Is it Time to Re-evaluate your Paperwork?

Jeffrey White looks at the recent increase in bedbug litigation he has seen the past months and strategies to protect your company from lawsuits.

Thursday June 23 2011 @ 06:24 PM Source:BedBug Central

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1.       Impress the Importance of Paperwork on Staff Members- Detailed documentation of what is observed during service treatments is critical to protecting your company while ensuring that customers receive the best possible results. It will be important for technicians to carefully note some the following items:

•        What the tech finds on an individual treatments.
•       Exactly where treatments are being applied and what is being conducted in specific rooms. This should go beyond general statements such as “we treated the living room with pesticides” a better description would be, “in the living room we treated couches with steam and applied pesticides to base board and treated outlets with dust.” This should be a room-to-room break down.
•       Comments on what is being found in individual houses, apartment and other structures.
•       Complications that are being encountered i.e. mattress located in closet suggesting that the closet is being used as a sleeping area.

2.       Complications with Surrounding Unit Treatments- White has noted that many of the lawsuits being filed are related to the mishandling of surrounding unit treatments. According to White, most of the surrounding unit lawsuits are from one to two years ago when the necessity to treat surrounding units was commonly known. He reminds pest management firms to ensure they are conducting surrounding unit inspections and documenting what is found in each unit. Techs will want to record the number each unit inspected and the type of activity observed or treatment performed.

3.       Ensure that your paperwork is up to date (docs package)- Whether you are using your own documentation or the BedBug Central Documents Package, you will want to periodically review your paperwork to ensure that it is consistent with the most recent legislation affecting bedbug treatments.