Ohio: Compensability of "Flow-Through" Injury Does Not Depend Upon its Foreseeability

In determining whether a "flow-through" or consequential injury is compensable, the claimant need not show that the second injury was foreseeable, given the nature of the first, held an Ohio appellate court. While a claimant was required to show that the earlier injury was the proximate cause of the new injury, the trial court erred in conflating the standard for proximate causation in a workers’ compensation claim with the standard for liability in a negligence claim. Here, the claimant contended her depression was causally linked to her earlier knee injury. The court stressed that the proper question was not whether claimant’s long-term disability and depression were foreseeable from her original injury, nor whether other, non-injury factors contributed to her depression. Instead, the court should have assessed whether claimant's depression stemmed from her knee injury (which both experts agreed was at least a causal factor) or from another “independent cause” that broke the “natural and continuous” causal chain from knee injury to depression.

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

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance.

See Dubose v. McCloud, 2020 Ohio App. LEXIS 3858 (Oct. 21, 2020)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 10.02.

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

For a more detailed discussion of the case, see

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