Workers' comp awarded to 911 dispatcher diagnosed with PTSD
The dispatcher was diagnosed with PTSD after handling a call and hearing details about a possible infanticide involving a hammer.
In a divided decision, the Supreme Court of Iowa reversed the ruling of the Scott County district court denying workers’ compensation benefits to a 911 dispatcher diagnosed with PTSD.
In September 2018, a veteran dispatcher, Mandy Tripp, fielded a call from a distraught mother who was screaming “Help me, my baby is dead.” It took Tripp nearly two-and-a-half minutes to get an address from the woman so she could send emergency personnel.
After the call ended, however, radio traffic related to the call continued. Tripp heard one officer say the baby had apparently been struck multiple times with a hammer, another mentioned “a potential crime scene” and a third stated that “rigor [mortis] was already set in” when first responders arrived. All of these statements were made against the backdrop of the mother’s continuous screams.
Though Tripp finished her shift without incident, she became withdrawn, constantly feeling on the verge of tears and unable to shake the mother’s screams. She sought treatment and was diagnosed with PTSD by both a licensed mental health counselor and a psychologist. The mental health professional who examined Tripp for litigation purposes more than six months later also entered a diagnosis of PTSD.
All three of the mental health professionals who evaluated Tripp said her PTSD was a direct result of the 911 call from the distraught mother, and agreed that Tripp would need to continue taking medication and attending therapy as part of her treatment for PTSD. When Tripp filed for workers’ compensation benefits based on her mental injuries, her employer, Scott Emergency Communication Center (Scott) denied the claim.
At the subsequent hearing, three of Tripp’s coworkers testified that, though the call from the mother was disturbing, it was not necessarily unexpected or unusual for an emergency dispatch center. Scott also submitted evidence of multiple accommodations it had made for Tripp’s PTSD, including but not limited to reduced work hours, wearing headphones to block loud noises, and permission to leave work if she received a PTSD-triggering call.
Tripp herself admitted to taking other traumatic calls since September 2018, and even stated that speaking with barely coherent individuals wasn’t out of the ordinary for a 911 dispatcher. The deputy workers’ compensation commissioner denied benefits because Tripp “failed to prove that the PTSD-inducing call was ‘unusual’ or ‘unexpected,’” which was a necessary element of a claim for mental injury. The deputy commissioner later refused Tripp’s motion for rehearing. Tripp’s appeals, first to the workers’ compensation commissioner and then to the district court, were likewise unsuccessful.
The Supreme Court of Iowa looked at the mental injury standard from Brown v. Quik Trip Corp., which had awarded workers’ compensation benefits to a store clerk who developed PTSD following an apparent armed robbery one week after witnessing the shooting of a store customer. In that case, the Iowa Supreme Court had held that “an employee [who] establishes that the mental injury at issue is ‘based on a manifest happening of a sudden traumatic nature from an unexpected cause or unusual strain’” may be awarded benefits.
The Iowa code did not define “unusual strain,” and the court pointed out that the test from Brown only asked whether or not an employee’s injury “arose out of and in the course of employment.” If the court narrowed the focus to the strains particular to an employee’s work when considering workers’ compensation cases, as Scott suggested it do, it would put first responders at a disadvantage. They, unlike the general public, confronted “unexpected causes” and situations involving “unusual strain” as a regular part of their work. Neither Brown nor the Iowa code explicitly gave or even implied a heightened standard connecting an employee’s particular job and their mental injury. The decision of the workers’ compensation commissioner was reversed and remanded to determine the amount of benefits to which Tripp was entitled.
A concurring opinion to this decision pointed out that simply because disturbing calls were part of “the relatively routine nature” of emergency dispatch did not mean such calls could never “[be] classified as…sudden, traumatic, and unexpected event[s].”
As Tripp had agreed at trial, disturbing calls, even those involving the death of children, were a natural part of emergency dispatch work. The difference in Tripp’s case, however, was that the dead baby mentioned in the call might have been murdered, as evidenced by the chatter Tripp overheard concerning a potential crime scene and markings on the infant indicating beating by a hammer. Infant homicide in Iowa was extremely rare in and of itself, so the call leading to Tripp’s PTSD could not have been “a regular part” of her work because it dealt with a rare subject matter.
A dissenting opinion to the case argued that the workers’ compensation commission had correctly interpreted the statute and the denial of benefits should have been affirmed.
Insurance Coverage Law Center editor’s note: Mental injury claims aren’t always accompanied by measurable, physical symptoms, which makes them trickier to determine than physical injury claims. Many policies will only cover mental injuries that are a direct result of a preceding physical injury. In this case, the issue at hand was whether or not the exposure to the traumatizing incident could be considered part of the normal work environment and should therefore be expected, and whether such disturbing incidents, even if part of the normal work environment, could have a causal connection to an employee’s mental injury. Even someone regularly exposed to difficult, disturbing situations may suffer a mental injury from an out-of-the-ordinary disturbing situation encountered on the job.
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