Kansas lawmakers seek to clarify workplace accident definition

Lawmakers in Kansas are considering a bill that would amend the language in the state’s workers compensation code to redefine the term “accident.”

H.B. 2016, pre-filed for Jan. 11, states that an accident is “an undesigned, sudden and unexpected traumatic event, usually of an afflictive or unfortunate nature and often, but not necessarily, accompanied by a manifestation of force.”

While an accident shall be “identifiable by time and place of occurrence, produce at the time symptoms of an injury and occur during a single work shift,” it must be a “substantial factor in causing the injury,” reads the bill, which eliminates the language that the accident must be “the prevailing factor in causing the injury.”

 The proposed revision maintains the language that accident “shall in no case be construed to include repetitive trauma in any form.”

On repetitive trauma, the bill would eliminate existing language that the trauma must be “the prevailing” factor in causing the injury, replacing it with the requirement that it must be “a substantial factor in causing the injury.”

The bill also would eliminate language that states that “an injury is not compensable solely because it aggravates, accelerates or exacerbates a preexisting condition or renders a preexisting condition symptomatic.”