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Covered injuries

The word "injury" is very broad. It includes everything from sudden injuries like broken limbs or pulled muscles to injuries that take a long time to surface, like asbestosis (from repeated exposure to asbestos) or repetitive stress conditions (from typing too much).

• Examples
• Are emotional injuries covered?
• Claim procedure

Examples

Here are some examples of injuries that qualify and injuries that don't:

If the employee is working on a construction site and a coworker accidentally breaks an arm with a 2 x 4, this is obviously an on-the-job injury, and it's covered.

If an employee is delivering packages and gets in a traffic accident, any injury the employee sustains should be covered.

If the employee is delivering packages, but takes a three-hour break from work to go and visit grandma and take her shopping in your employer's van - and then becomes involved in a traffic accident - the employee probably will not be covered by workers' compensation, because the accident did not occur within the scope of employment.

If an employee takes a break from the job every hour to smoke a cigarette and this causes cancer after many years, the employee won't get workers' compensation to cover cancer treatment, because this "injury" had nothing to do with work - the employee was smoking on his or her own time.

If a supervisor yells at an employee every day and this causes stress, needed treatment, and lost days of work, it could be covered by workers' compensation - unless other problems in the employee's life are the main cause of the stress.

Are emotional injuries covered?

Yes. An injury doesn't have to be physical - it can be emotional. But it can be difficult for the employee to prove that the stress is caused by the job. And if an employee makes a stress claim, you might be able to examine the employee's psychological records to verify the injury.