Supreme Court Concludes That When Medical Causation is Established, The Legal Causation Factor in Mental Injuries is Met When There is an Unexpected or Unusual Event Without Regards to the Claimant's Own Particular Duties

 Tripp v. Scott Emergency Communication Center, No. 21-0841 (Iowa June 3, 2022)

Mental injuries in the workers' compensation context have long been treated differently than physical injuries despite the fact that the statute does not explicitly create such a distinction.  In Dunlavey v. Economy Fire & Casualty Co., 526 N.W.2d 845 (Iowa 1995), the Court concluded that mental injuries that did not involve a physical component were compensable under the statute.  The Court, however, concluded that a claimant must demonstrate both medical causation and "legal causation."  The latter phrase requires an employee to show that the mental injury resulted from "workplace stress of greater magnitude than the day-to-day mental stresses experienced by other workers employed in the same or similar jobs, regardless of employer."  In Brown v. Quik Trip, 641 N.W.2d 725 (Iowa 2002), the Court relaxed the legal test in situations where the claimant's mental injury was "based on a manifest happening of a sudden traumatic nature from an unexpected cause or unusual strain."  In Brown, the claimant had seen a customer being shot and was later held up by an apparently armed robber, which was found to be an unexpected cause or unusual strain.  These claims were compensable regardless of the absence of similar stress on other employees.

In Tripp, claimant was a long-time emergency dispatcher, who routinely fielded calls from the public (between 50 and 200 per day), some of which involved disturbing events.  Other dispatchers, of course, handled similar calls.  On the date of injury, claimant answered a 911 call from a woman "screaming at a very high pitch, 'Help me, my baby is dead.  Help me, my baby is dead, over and over and over.'" Ms. Tripp subsequently heard police officers talking about a potential crime scene involving injuries to the child's face, suggesting that the child had been beaten with a claw hammer.  Claimant called her husband soon thereafter, indicating she had experienced a "really bad phone call." She subsequently developed PTSD, which was ultimately found to have resulted in a permanent disability.  Claimant's doctors established the existence of PTSD traceable to the incident and there was no medical evidence to the contrary.

Claimant filed a claim for workers' compensation benefits and was denied those benefits by the agency, which concluded that since claimant worked in a field where stressful calls were a part of the job, this was not a workplace stress of greater magnitude than other workers in the field experienced (there was testimony at the hearing that claimant and other workers in her office had fielded calls involving dead children in the past).  The agency refused benefits, citing Dunlavey.  The district court affirmed this result.

The Court first finds that claimant's mental injury was a "personal injury" under the statute, based on both Dunlavey and Brown.  The more difficult question was whether the claimant demonstrated that the injury arose out of employment, the "legal causation" requirement of Dunlavey.  Defendants argued that claimant had not demonstrated she had suffered an injury involving workplace stress of a greater magnitude than other workers involved in the work of emergency dispatchers.  No claim was made that claimant had not demonstrated medical causation or that her claims were fraudulent.  Defendants argued that the focus should be on the employee's particular job duties to determine whether an event was an "unexpected cause or unusual strain.

In rejecting defendants' argument, the Court noted that Iowa's workers' compensation statute did not contain any language stating that injuries must result from an unexpected cause or unusual strain.  The relevant portion of Brown, according to the Court, simply asked whether claimant's injury arose out of and in the course of employment.  The Court noted that focusing on an employee's own job disfavored emergency workers, firefighters, police and other similarly situated workers, requiring them to prove hyper-unexpected causes and hyper-unusual strains to be eligible for benefits.  Nothing in the language of Brown or in the text of section 85.3(1) made the "unexpectedness" or "unusualness" of the traumatic event dependent on the employee's own job duties.  Ultimately, the Court concluded that "for mental injuries 'based on a manifest happening of a sudden traumatic nature from an unexpected cause or unusual strain' legal causation is established without regard to the regular duties of the particular employee or other employees in similar positions.  According to the Court, requiring a higher standard of proof for PTSD based on fears of fraud invaded a sphere reserved for the legislature.  The Court considered this result consistent with Brown as well as consistent with cases from other jurisdictions, particularly those involving emergency responders.  

Chief Justice Christenson filed a concurring opinion in which she urges that legislature to provide a legislative solution similar to that used in Minnesota.  Under that statute, PTSD which occurs to a first responder is presumed to be caused by the job, with the presumption being rebuttable.

Justice Waterman, writing for three members of the Court, dissented, finding that precedent required claimant to show that employees show that a triggering event was sudden, traumatic and unexpected "in their occupation."  The Justice also indicated that "the majority's ill-advised change to the legal causation element in mental injury claims opens the floodgates to fraudulent claims that are difficult to disprove and will drive up the cost of doing business in Iowa."