About Victor Alexander
The law firm of Victor Alexander, Jr. P.C., has been successfully representing Georgians suffering a loss of quality of life due to an accident or injury for more than three decades. Let us help you obtain the medical and income benefits you need for your Workers’ Compensation or Personal Injury claim.
Posts Tagged ‘idiopathic fall’
Fall at Work – When Are Worker’s Compensation Benefits Paid For An Idiopathic Fall?
Tuesday, February 10th, 2015You are standing on a ladder at work and feel dizzy. The next thing you know, you are on the ground, your shoulder hurts, and co-workers are asking if you are okay. Is this a work injury? Will your employer pay your medical bills or income benefits if you lose any time?
Idiopathic falls are falls that are caused by a personal condition, like fainting because of low-blood pressure, or having a heart attack or a seizure. You would haven fallen no matter where you were when you had the episode. Your job did not cause the fall. Generally, worker’s compensation benefits are not paid for idiopathic falls. However, if your job places you in a dangerous position (like on ladder) and increases the risk that you will be injured when you have that fall, you may recover benefits for lost time and medical bills. Other examples are falling onto a hot stove or hitting your head on a piece of machinery. See, United States Cas. Co. v. Richardson, 75 Ga.App. 496, 43 S.E.2d 793 (1947).
But you will not get benefits if you have an idiopathic fall and just hit your head on the floor or a baseboard, because there is no distinction between the floor at work and the floor anywhere else—wherever you were when you fell, there would have been a floor. Borden Foods Co. v. Dorsey, 112 Ga.App. 838, 146 S.E.2d 532 (Ga. App., 1965). Prudential Bank v. Moore, 219 Ga.App. 847, 467 S.E.2d 7 (Ga. App., 1996). Your injury must arise out of your employment and “fairly be traced to the employment as a contributing proximate cause… [it must not come] from a hazard to which the workmen would have been equally exposed apart from the employment. The causative danger must be peculiar to the work.” Fried v. United States Fidelity & Guar. Co, 192 Ga. 492, 15 S.E.2d 704 (Ga., 1941). Therefore, the traveling salesman who slipped and fell on a wet street was subjected to the risk by the nature of his job, even though the risk of crossing a wet street was one shared by the public at large. Thornton v. Hartford Accident etc., Co. 198 Ga. 786, 32 S.E.2d 816 (1945). If a wall falls on you at work when a tornado roars through, make a claim if your job required you to be in the building when the tornado hit. Nat. Fire Ins. Co. v. Edwards, 152 Ga. App. 566, 263 S.E.2d 455 (1979). And if you break your leg as you are hurrying down the supermarket aisle where you work as a cashier, and you don’t trip or slip or come into contact with an object, you may still get benefits, although the decision in Johnson v. Publix Supermarkets, 256 Ga. App. 540, 568 S.E.2d 827 (2002) has been severely criticized by subsequent courts.
But even if you can prove that your job put you in danger by requiring you to be where you were “when the peril struck,” known as the ‘positional risk doctrine’, there must still be a causal connection between the injury and the job. So the worker who fell when her knee gave out on her employer’s premises as she was hurrying to clock in was out of luck in Chapparal Boats, Inc. v. Heath, 269 Ga. App. 339, 606 S. E.2d 567 (Ga. App. 2004). Likewise, a nurse who was injured when she stood and turned to get a cup of water for a patient and her knee gave out “was not exposed to any risk unique to her employment by standing and turning” and was not entitled to benefits. St. Joseph’s Hospital v. Ward, 300 Ga. App. 845 (2009). And in Chambers v. Monroe County Board of Commrs., A14A0265 (Ct. App. July 16, 2014), the Court found that an employee who was injured when she stood up from her desk at the direction of her supervisor had an idiopathic fall that did not arise out of her employment. The Court deferred to the findings of fact of the Board, although the ALJ had found the injury compensable.
But in Harris v. Peach County Bd of Commrs., 296 Ga. App. 225 (2009), the Court found that “when a supervisor expressly directs an employee to undertake a specific physical activity, and the employee is then injured while carrying out that very activity, there is a sufficient causal connection between the conditions of employment and the resulting injury to warrant compensation, no matter how mundane the physical activity itself (i.e. walking or standing, etc.) may be.” Clearly in order to have a successful claim for an injury from an idiopathic fall, it is important to connect the activity during which the injury occurred to the specific duties of the job.
Workers Compensation Injuries from a Fall
Thursday, December 15th, 2011Idiopathic
Claimant fell as she was turning down a store aisle. She fractured her leg in the fall and subsequently filed a claim for workers’ compensation. The administrative law judge ruled that Johnson’s injury arose out of the course of employment. On appeal the Superior Court of Houston County reversed and the Court of Appeals then received the case and they reversed. Johnson v. Publix Supermarkets, 256 Ga. App. 540, 568 S.E.2d 827 (2002).
This case seems to reverse the issue of idiopathic fall and quotes many cases which state as follows: “Physical contact with some object is no necessary in order for the employee to sustain an accident within the meaning of the workers’ compensation law. See Orkin Exterminating Company v. Wright, 92 Ga. App. 224, 88 S.E.2d 205 (1955).
The Court goes on to say that the Hartford accident for the Hartford Accident & Indemnity Co. v. Cox, 61 Ga. App. 420, 6 S.E.2d 189 (1939) the Court held that to be compensable injuries do not have to arise from something peculiar to the employment.
Instead where the duties of an employee entail his presence at the place and a time, the claimant for an injury there occurring is not to be barred because it results from a risk common to all others, a concept that came to be known as a “positional risk doctrine”. While subject cases have cited Borden Foods v. Dorsey, 112 Ga. App. 838, 146 S.E.2d 532 (1965), the proposition that there must be a causal connection between the employment and the injury (such as the specific incurrence) its requirement of a “peculiar danger”, is no longer good law and was overruled by National Fire Insurance Company v. Edwards, 152 Ga. App. 566, 263 S.E.2d 455 (1979).
Slip and Fall/Rubber Mat
Plaintiff slipped and fell at a store and alleged that the store breeched a duty it owed her as an invitee when she tripped and fell on a mat. The trial court granted a summary judgment on behalf of the store. Where the Supreme Court has held 1) as a general proposition, issues of negligence, contributory negligence and lack of ordinary care for one’s own safety are not susceptible of summary adjudication but should instead be resolved by trial in the ordinary matter and 2) trial court can conclude as a matter of law that the facts do or do not show negligence on the part of the defendant or the plaintiff only where the evidence is plain, palpable and undisputable. Issues such as how closely a particular retailer should monitor its premises and approaches, what retailers should know about the property’s condition at any given time, how vigilant patrons must be for their own safety in various settings and where customers should be held responsible or not responsible for looking or not looking are all questions that, in general must be answered by juries as a matter of fact rather than by judges as a matter of law. See Robinson v. Kroger Company, 268 Ga. 735, 493 S.E.2d 403 (1997) See Also American Multi-Cinema, Inc v. Brown, 285 Ga. 442, 679 S.E.2d 25 (2009) and Mairs v. Whole Foods Market Group, Inc, 303 Ga. App. 638,694 S.E.2d 129 (2010).
In Georgia, a proprietor has a statutory duty to exercise ordinary care to keep its premises safe which, includes inspecting the premises to discover possible dangerous conditions of which the proprietor does not have actual knowledge and taking reasonable precautions to protect invitees from dangers foreseeable from the arrangement or use of the premises. The plaintiff or invitee must prove 1) that the defendant had actual or constructive knowledge of the hazard and 2) that the plaintiff lacked knowledge of the hazardous despite the exercise of ordinary care due to actions or conditions within the control of the owner/occupier.
In the case of floor mats which are subject to folding, bunching, rolling and shifting can constitute hazards for which landowners may be liable. In this case, the owner inspected the premises at 7:00 a.m. with the accident occurring at 5:00 a.m. The courts decided to leave it to a jury instead of summary judgment for adjudication because the owner may have lacked a reasonable inspection procedure. A plaintiff need not show how long a hazard was present unless the owner has first demonstrated its inspection procedures. The evidence must establish an adherence to customary inspection procedures on the day in question and not simply that such procedures exist. All of this is cited in Benefield v. Tominich, 2011 WL 982973. (CASE NO. A10A2242) (DEC’D 3/22/11).
Learn more about Slip and Fall accidents.
