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Do You Know the Rule? Wash. Stress, Single Traumatic Events

09 Jan, 2024 Frank Ferreri

                               

Tacoma, WA (WorkersCompensation.com) -- Stressed out in Seattle? It may be compensable if it results from a single traumatic event. That's because in the State of Washington, stress resulting from exposure to a single traumatic event will be adjudicated as an industrial injury.

Examples of single traumatic events include:

+ Actual or threatened death.
+ Actual or threatened physical assault.
+ Actual or threatened sexual assault.
+ Life-threatening traumatic injury.

These exposures must occur in one of the following ways:

+ Directly experiencing the traumatic event.
+ Witnessing, in person, the event as it occurred to others.
+ Extreme exposure to aversive details of the traumatic event.

Repeated exposure to traumatic events, none of which is a single traumatic event, is not an industrial injury or an occupational disease. A single traumatic event that occurs within a series of exposures will be adjudicated as an industrial injury.

Workers' Comp 101: In Rothwell v. Nine Mile Falls School District, 295 P.3d 328 (Wash. Ct. App. 2013), a school custodian was called into work, but she was not informed why. When she arrived, she was instructed to clean up an area of the school where a student she had known had taken his own life by a gunshot to the head. At the scene, the custodian removed medical supplies, brain matter, pieces of bone, and blood. The court concluded that the custodian's PTSD was occasioned by a single traumatic event, the clean up of the suicide scene.

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    About The Author

    • Frank Ferreri

      Frank Ferreri, M.A., J.D. covers workers' compensation legal issues. He has published books, articles, and other material on multiple areas of employment, insurance, and disability law. Frank received his master's degree from the University of South Florida and juris doctor from the University of Florida Levin College of Law.

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