Virginia: Employee Must Show “Identifiable Incident” to Recover for Injury by Accident

Observing that the question of whether an employee had suffered an “injury by accident” presented a mixed question of fact and law and further, that in Virginia, gradually incurred traumatic injuries or cumulative trauma conditions are not compensable, a state appellate court held that the evidence supported the Commission’s finding that an employee failed to prove an “identifiable incident” that caused his injury where it appeared that his injury occurred after repeating the same motions and activities for many hours. To prove an “injury by accident,” a claimant was required to establish (1) an identifiable incident; (2) that occurred at some reasonably definite time; (3) an obvious sudden mechanical or structural change in the body; and (4) a causal connection between the incident and the bodily change. He had failed to make such a showing in spite of his argument that the situation was exacerbated by working within the tight quarters of a movie theater for a considerable period of time.

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

See Kim v. Roto Rooter Servs. Co., 2017 Va. App. LEXIS 61 (Mar. 7, 2017)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 52.03.

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