A divided Iowa Supreme Court on Friday ruled the post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by a 911 dispatcher who answered a phone call from a mother screaming after her infant was killed with a claw hammer is compensable under the state’s workers compensation code. 

On appeal, the court was asked to determine whether state law places on emergency responders a different, higher bar to be eligible for benefits for trauma-induced mental injuries suffered on the job than workers in other roles with identical injuries, according to No. 21–0841, filed in Des Moines.  

A 16-year veteran of Scott County’s emergency dispatch system answered a 911 call from a woman screaming over and over at a high pitch for more than two minutes. The operator eventually got the woman’s address and dispatched first responders.  

In the months that followed, the responder “couldn’t shake the mother’s screams from her mind or her ears. Loud noises, in particular, would trigger debilitating anxiety,” according to the ruling. 

Two doctors diagnosed her with PTSD resulting from the call. “She was prescribed medication to address the PTSD and wore special headphones to drown out loud noises, sometimes even wearing special musicians’ earplugs under larger noise-canceling headphones. It helped, but not enough. (The dispatcher) found herself unable to perform her job duties as an emergency dispatcher as she had before,” the ruling states.  

While injuries from mental trauma suffered on the job have long been recognized as a basis to provide workers comp in Iowa, the woman’s claim “didn’t satisfy the test of legal causation” according to a workers comp commissioner and district court, “because 911 dispatchers routinely take calls involving death and traumatic injury, and the mother’s harrowing call thus wasn’t an ‘unexpected cause or unusual strain.’”  

In reversing, the state’s highest court wrote that the dispatcher “established that her PTSD resulted from a manifest happening of a sudden traumatic nature from an unexpected cause or unusual strain,” adding that the dispatcher “was always able to deal with the trauma of the job for sixteen years until, one horrific day, she wasn’t.” The court also argued that the bar for PTSD shouldn’t be higher for some professions than others.  

Two justices agreed and one justice wrote a separate, concurring opinion, calling for the need for PTSD presumption legislative in Iowa.  

Three of the seven justices dissented, one writing that the decision “overrules our caselaw that required employees claiming purely mental injuries to show that the triggering event was sudden, traumatic, and unexpected in their occupation. Substantial evidence supported the commissioner’s factual determination that (the dispatcher’s) phone call with the hysterical mother was not an unexpected event for an emergency dispatcher, as other witnesses testified.”