Ohio: For Going and Coming Rule Purposes, Home Health Care Aide May Not Have Been Fixed-Situs Employee

An Ohio home health aide who worked, at her employer’s direction, at the home of various clients and who sustained injuries in an auto accident as she traveled from one client’s home to that of another, was not as a matter of law a fixed-situs employee for purposes of the going and coming rule. It was error, therefore, for the trial court to grant summary judgment in favor of the employer with regard to the employee’s claim for workers’ compensation benefits. The appellate court stressed that Ohio’s coming-and-going rule only applies to fixed-situs employees. It noted that there was conflict among the various district appellate courts as to whether home health aides and nurses were fixed-situs employees. The court said that here there were genuine issues of material fact as to whether the aide was a fixed-situs employee. Although she was not paid for travel time, her travel was subject to reimbursement, and was also governed by conditions imposed by the employer. In addition, the aide had no office at the employer’s facility, travel was an essential feature of her job, and she was assigned to see more than one client on the date of her injury. Further, the accident occurred minutes after she left the first client’s home, and while en route to the second client, a duty required by the employer.

Thomas A. Robinson, J.D., the Feature National Columnist for the LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation eNewsletter, is the co-author of Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law (LexisNexis).

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance.

See Franklin v. BHC Servs., 2017-Ohio–655, 2017 Ohio App. LEXIS 646 (Feb. 23, 2017)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 13.01.

Source: Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, the nation’s leading authority on workers’ compensation law