Virginia: EMT’s Fainting Episode in Emergency Room Did Not Arise Out of Employment

A Virginia emergency room paramedic, who fainted serious injuries when he fainted while assisting a physician as the latter inserted a needle into a patient’s spine, is not entitled to workers’ compensation benefits, held a state appellate court. The court indicated that while was no question that the injuries were sustained in the course of the employment, he failed to show that they actually arose from the employment. Repeating that Virginia uses the so-called “actual risk test,” the court indicated the EMT failed to show that the causative danger was peculiar to the work environment and not merely common to the neighborhood. The court also stressed that while the EMT had established a correlation between the particular spinal procedure and his loss of consciousness, he had failed to show an actual causal relationship between the two. Medical records indicated there were other potential causes that he had not ruled out.

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 Lynchburg Gen. Hosp. v. Foster, 2018 Va. App. LEXIS 90 (Apr. 10, 2018)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 7.04.

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

For a more detailed discussion of the case, see