An insurance company auditor is not owed workers comps benefits for an alleged stress-related incident that resulted a stay in intensive care, a New York appeals court ruled last week upholding lower court rulings.
According to court papers, the claimant said that prior to having an anxiety attack at work in 2020 she had been discussing her work in a text-based Skype conversation with her supervisor. The interaction elevated her stress and made her feel angry and frustrated “given the additional duties that she had been performing,” according to the Aug. 3 decision in case No. 535539, in the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of New York, Third Department.
“During the conversation, claimant first began to feel certain physical symptoms including blurry vision and ‘excruciating’ pain in her head, all of which she had not previously experienced prior to the work-related incident despite having active prescriptions for anxiety/depression and high blood pressure,” records state.
The woman visited an urgent care center that day and was taken by ambulance to an emergency room, where she complained of a headache and was determined to have elevated blood pressure. She was admitted to the intensive care unit and discharged a day later, after being diagnosed with “essential hypertension, migraine without aura and hypertension urgency,” according to court documents.
The employer, Utica Mutual Insurance Co., denied the claim citing a lack of medical evidence of an injury, no causal relationship and no evidence of stress “greater than that experienced by other similarly situated workers.”
For similar reasons, a Workers’ Compensation Law Judge ruled in favor of the employer and the state Workers’ Compensation Board affirmed.
The appeals court ruling stated “claimant’s peers were subject to the same daily and hourly quotas for completion of audits, and, to the extent that claimant undertook additional mail audits, claimant’s supervisor offered help with her workload if necessary.”