CHARLESTON — The West Virginia Supreme Court affirmed a decision to reject a Workers' Compensation injury case.
Robert Hood's workers' compensation claim for a right knee sprain suffered while descending stairs during a work-related delivery has been denied, with subsequent appeals failing to overturn the decision, according to a Nov. 8 opinion by the West Virginia Supreme Court.
Chief Justice Beth Walker authored the majority opinion. Justice John Hutchison partially concurs and partially dissents, while Justice Bill Wooton dissents.
On May 1, 2020, while delivering medical supplies for Lincare Holdings, Hood felt a sudden pain in his right knee as he descended a short set of stairs from a customer's porch.
Despite reporting the incident promptly and seeking medical attention, Hood's claim was rejected by the West Virginia Workers' Compensation Board of Review.
The events leading to Hood's injury involve a routine delivery. After greeting a customer and handling oxygen bottles, he walked up the porch stairs to make the delivery. While descending the three wooden steps, he felt a "pop" and extreme burning in his right knee.
Hood did not slip, trip or fall, and he was not carrying anything. He immediately informed his supervisor, Kim Harmon, about the potential knee injury and continued with one more delivery before returning the employer's van and seeking medical attention.
Medical examinations revealed a right knee sprain and subsequent diagnoses included a tear of the right medial meniscus. The claim administrator, however, denied Hood's application for workers' compensation benefits, asserting that the injury did not occur during employment.
Despite Hood's protests, an Administrative Law Judge and the Board of Review upheld the denial, emphasizing the lack of evidence linking the injury to work activities.
In Hood's appeal, he argued that the American Medical Facilities v. Parsons case presented a more similar scenario than the Board of Review acknowledged. The court, however, rejected this contention, pointing out distinctions in the fact patterns. In Parsons, the claimant, a nurse, slipped and fell while walking through a tunnel to a breakroom during a mandated lunch break, sustaining injuries to her head, left elbow and left knee.
The court found the Parsons claim compensable due to the clear association between the mechanism of injury and employment-related risks.
In contrast, the court asserted that Hood's case lacked a clear causal connection between his work activities and the knee sprain.
The fact that Hood did not get his foot stuck on the step, leading to a fall and subsequent injury, distinguished his case from Parsons. The court emphasized the importance of different fact patterns yielding different results in workers' compensation cases.
The court affirmed the Board of Review's decision, stating that while Hood's injury occurred while working, it did not result from his employment. The lack of a causal connection between the workplace and the injury was deemed sufficient grounds to reject the claim for workers' compensation benefits.
In his concurring in part opinion, Hutchison wrote that the issue in the case is compensability. He wrote that he would have found that the injury was compensable and reversed the decision of the Board of Review.
"I believe that Mr. Hood has demonstrated an increased risk of a quantitative nature from his employment," Hutchison wrote. "Indeed, on the day he was injured, he was compelled to walk up and down the stairs more times than the average person would have had to: up the stairs to retrieve the empty oxygen bottles, down the stairs to put the empty bottles in the delivery truck, up the stairs again with the full oxygen bottles weighing twenty-two pounds, and then down the stairs again, when he was injured."
In his dissent, Wooton wrote that the majority's holding is an outlier and it is contrary to precedents by the Supreme Court.
"Had the majority merely applied the legal precedents of this court to the facts of this case it would have easily found Mr. Hood’s injury compensable," Wooton wrote in his dissent.
Climbing or descending stairs is a neutral risk, but the repetitive nature of these actions in Hood's job distinguishes it from typical daily living, establishing a heightened risk, Wooton wrote.
Attorneys for the petitioner and the respondent decline to comment on the matter.
West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals case number: 21-0754