A police dispatcher with post-traumatic stress disorder, a truck driver who fell out of his truck while smoking, a firefighter with nightmares about spiders and off-the-clock injuries were among the top injury compensability legal disputes in workers compensation circles in 2018.

The Oregon Court of Appeals in March reversed the ruling in a case involving a 911 dispatcher in Oregon who claimed she had post-traumatic stress disorder related to a 1996 incident in which she dispatched officers to a scene where a suspect had been shot. In that ruling, the court found that the woman’s employer lacked sufficient evidence to disprove her psychiatric condition following the incident and that she was eligible for workers compensation.

In another case in February, the Arkansas Court of Appeals ruled a sleeping firefighter who suffered a foot fracture in the midst of a nightmare that spiders were crawling all over him was not eligible for workers compensation. The appellate court wrote in its ruling that the injury was unrelated to employment: “Because an idiopathic injury is not related to employment, it is generally not compensable unless conditions related to the employment contribute to the risk.”

In May, the North Carolina Court of Appeals used the word “idiopathic” in its ruling that a smoke-break injury suffered by a City of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, employee who fell out of a city truck in a coughing fit suffered while smoking his first e-cigarette was not compensable because he was not injured within the scope of his employment.

The Supreme Court of Kansas in June affirmed a lower court’s decision to deny workers compensation benefits to a roofer who was severely injured after being hit by a drunk driver while walking from a bar to the hotel where he was staying for an out-of-town job.             

Another off-the-clock injury made headlines when a Superior Court of Delaware judge in April ruled that a law firm employee injured while playing on his firm’s softball team in 2017 is not entitled to workers compensation because the game was voluntary and failed to benefit the law firm’s business practices.