The woman walked into the Salamander Bay Shopping Centre shortly before 9am on January 5, 2017, and tripped on a wet weather mat placed there by cleaning staff some 20 minutes earlier.

The fall was captured on CCTV footage and submitted to the District Court where Pamela Kime has claimed the shopping centre and its cleaning staff were negligent in the placement and management of the mats.

She fell hard on to her right side and sustained soft tissue injuries which required her to be removed from the scene in a wheelchair. District Court Judge Leonard Levy said he found Mrs Kime was not exaggerating when she said the injuries ruined her life.

Judge Levy found the shopping centre, owned by Vicinity Centres PM Pty Ltd, and its cleaning contractor, Millenium Hi-Tech Group Pty Ltd, negligent for failing to put in adequate measures to identify the trip hazard to customers, and put in place and carry out sufficient measures to guard against it.

The mats were regularly placed outside the centre's three entrances during wet weather and were to be inspected every 15-20 minutes to ensure no kinks or humps had formed, as was known to randomly occur with general foot and shopping trolley traffic.

Those inspections did not occur on the day in question, and if they did, the hump which caused Mrs Kime's fall could have been identified and removed, he concluded.

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A yellow warning cone placed at the entrance only pointed to the wet floor, and not to the possibility of wet weather mats being kinked or prone to slippage, he said.

If such signs were not available, then staff should have been stationed at the entrances when the mats were in place, both to monitor the mats for kinks and straighten them out, and to warn entering customers of the risk.

Judge Levy said Mrs Kime's presentation and evidence had been "restrained and stoic". He rejected claims that the risk of tripping on the wet weather mats was obvious, or should have been obvious to her, saying the premises "did not constitute a known obstacle course".

It was not her responsibility to "stop walking and undertake a close and focussed examination of the safety of the state of the floor and its coverings ahead of where, where on on first glance, she did not detect the hump in question", he said.

He accepted medical evidence detailing the effects of shoulder, knee and back injuries, which included, over time, reduced her mobility making every day tasks such as cleaning, gardening, vacuuming, and getting down on the floor to play with her grandson impossible.

In his judgment, handed down earlier this month, Judge Levy found the two defendants, Vicinity Centres PM Pty Ltd and Millenium Hi-Tech Group Pty Ltd, negligent, apportioning 60/40 per cent responsibility for the $172,554 payout respectively.

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