New York: Registered Nurse Could Not Recover for Mental Injury Where Genesis of Claim Arose from Bona Fide Personnel Action

Stressing that the state’s Workers’ Compensation Board was to be afforded significant deference to its decisions related to witness credibility, a New York appellate court affirmed a Board finding that a nurse’s work-related stress did not exceed that which could be expected in her normal work environment and that the actual genesis of her mental injuries was her involvement in a disciplinary proceeding taken in good faith by her employer. Accordingly, under N.Y. Work. Comp. Law § 2[7], she could not maintain a mental injury claim where it appeared her claim arose from her dismissal from work and her subsequent reinstatement to the job—after a six-month suspension.

Thomas A. Robinson, J.D., the Feature National Columnist for the LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation eNewsletter, is the co-author of Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law (LexisNexis).

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance.

See Matter of Novak v St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hosp., 2017 N.Y. App. Div. LEXIS 2437 (3rd Dept. Mar. 30, 2017)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 56.04.

Source: Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, the nation’s leading authority on workers’ compensation law