A court in Pennsylvania on Friday awarded death benefits to the spouse of a chief emergency medical technician who died of a heart attack while working at a charity event for his employer, which had denied benefits over the man’s preexisting heart condition.
In previous rulings, a state Workers’ Compensation Judge and the state’s Workers’ Compensation Appeal Board gave greater credibility to the claimant’s expert witness, a doctor who “acknowledged Decedent’s coronary artery disease, and numerous contributing medical conditions… (and) opined that patients with coronary artery disease are at a substantially higher risk of cardiac events during times of emotional or physical stress,” according to Prospect Medical Holdings Inc. v. R.C. Reeder, Decedent, c/o K. Reeder Carr, filed in the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania.
In assessing the EMT’s work on the day he died, the doctor said that the “physical stress
of (his) climb up the steps at the stadium with approximately 50 to 60 pounds of medical equipment, coupled with the emotional stress of managing an understaffed department and working overtime hours, substantially contributed to (his) heart attack, which caused his death.”
The judge found the expert testimony of the employer’s doctor lacking such context, relying on the man’s preexisting medical condition as a basis for denying the claim, opining that stress-related heart attacks are “extremely rare” and that “nothing related to his work was associated with or contributed to his sudden heart attack.”
The board affirmed this ruling, as did the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania, writing that the judge’s assessment was “supported by competent and unequivocal medical testimony.”