New York: Home Health Attendant's Short Visit to Physician's Office was not Disqualifying Deviation

Reversing the state's Workers' Compensation Board, a New York appellate court said the Board's decision that a live-in home health attendant--who provided comprehensive care to one client, 24 hours a day, seven days per week--was engaged in a personal deviation at the time of her injury was not supported by substantial evidence. Evidence indicated the attendant generally took her wheelchair-bound client on a customary "walk," that during the walk, the attendant stopped by her personal physician's office (along with the client), and that the two women were injured when they fell on the physician's exit ramp as they left the building. The attendant also contended that she had also checked with the physician's office as to whether it would accept the health insurance that was maintained by the client--a factor that was strongly contested by the employer. The court said that issue was not relevant; the claimant-attendant's act of briefly stopping while on a routine walk with her client, regardless of where that stop took place, simply could not be said to be purely personally or wholly unrelated to her work.

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

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance.

See Matter of Sharipova v. BNV Home Care Agency, Inc., 2021 N.Y. App. Div. LEXIS 615 (Feb. 4, 2020)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 17.02.

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

For a more detailed discussion of the case, see

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