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Oakland - A new California Workers’ Compensation Institute (CWCI) study shows that almost half of all litigated claims in the LA Basin are cumulative trauma (CT) claims that involve physical or mental injuries that arise over time from repetitive stress, motion, or exposures, rather than from a specific event or accident.
The CWCI study, based on a sample of 1.4 million California work injury claims with 2010 to 2022 carrier notice dates, examines the growth of CT claims as a share of litigated claims in the California workers’ compensation system and explores the claim characteristics most associated with CT claims. The study found that statewide, CT claims increased from 29.4% to 37.5% of all litigated claims over the 13-year study period. Regional results showed that over that same period, CT claims’ share of all litigated claims was fairly stable in Northern California and the Central Valley, but increased in 2022, while in Southern California CT claims’ share of the litigated claims increased steadily throughout the period. The sharpest increase was in the Inland Empire/Orange County, where CT claims jumped from 30.2% of the litigated claims in 2010 to 40.6% in 2022, slightly more than the increase in Los Angeles County, where CT claims went from 38.6% to 48.7% of the litigated claims, and San Diego where CT claims increased from 25.0% of the litigated claims to 33.4%. A regression analysis, which controls for the influence of other variables, showed that the differences between the regions were only partially explained by differences in other underlying claim characteristics. Other key findings include:
CWCI’s analysis of CT claims has been published in a Research Note, Cumulative Trauma and Litigated Claims in the California Workers’ Compensation System. The report is available to the public here, and is available to CWCI members and research subscribers who log in to the Research section of the website here.