Oregon: Traveling Employee’s Death Caused by Metastatic Lung Cancer, Not any Work-Related Injury

An Oregon appellate court recently affirmed the denial of death benefits to a surviving spouse whose husband died seven days after sustaining a fracture in his left femur while walking through a hotel lobby during a business trip. The claimant contended that since her husband was traveling in connection to his work, any injury sustained during that travel was compensable under the traveling employee doctrine. The court observed, however, that the employee had been diagnosed with and was undergoing treatment for metastatic lung cancer that had spread to his bones, causing fractures. The employee’s death was not the result of a compensable injury. Rather his preexisting condition was the major contributing cause of the weakening in his bones and his resulting death [see ORS 656.005(7)(a)(B)].

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 In re Comp. of Thomas J. Hammond, 296 Ore. App. 241, 2019 Ore. App. LEXIS 277 (Feb. 27, 2019)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 25.01.

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