Increased susceptibility didn't change the fact job duties caused injury
An Ontario worker has won an appeal for workers’ compensation benefits for a neck injury found to be caused by her work duties.
The worker was employed in a factory environment making car frames on robotic devices. She often had to load and unload parts in an open frame used to guide the machine as part of her duties. She had a pre-existing impairment to her neck and left shoulder due to earlier injuries in early 2008, for which she had received a 10-per-cent pension in an earlier workers’ compensation claim.
In March 2011, the worker was performing her duties and lifting items over a wall which had a safety bar. The worker was fairly short in stature and the safety bar was at chest level, requiring her to bend at the chest, stand on her toes and reach down into the machine to get a grip on the part she had to lock into place. After doing this all day, the worker said she had bruises on her ribs from the safety bar. She asked her employer for a lift or ramp to be raised up so she wouldn’t have to bend at the chest, but her request was refused. Her doctor suggested she get a mat or something else to stand on, but that didn’t happen either.
The worker began to feel pain in her upper back, neck and left arm. She visited her doctor in April because of the pain and was diagnosed with a trapezius strain caused by repetitive bending forward and reaching. The doctor issued restrictions on lifting, bending, and reaching for the worker and referred her to physical therapy. Her employer provided modified work that involved lifting boxes and parts, but she found this didn’t help her condition. Her doctor then increased her restrictions and the employer had no further modified work for her.
The doctor also issued a report a few months later stating that since the worker hadn’t been involved in any other activity that could have caused the symptoms and hadn’t experienced pain since her injury three years earlier, the conclusion was that the worker’s symptoms “certainly arose from the activity that she was required to do at work.”
The worker had x-rays taken in May 2012 which found she had degenerative disc disease in her mid-cervical spine and mild arthritis.
Early in 2013, the worker had to take time off and her doctor provided a report that said she was “disabled as a direct result of her WSIB compensable injury to her shoulder and neck.” However, in August 2013 a workers’ compensation adjudicator found the x-rays and other medical reports showed the worker had “considerable non-work-related factors including fibromyalgia and degenerative disc disease in the neck that could be the cause of the problems” and rejected the worker’s claim for workers’ compensation.
Shortly after her claim was rejected, a physiatrist observed pictures of the worker’s workstation and submitted a report that while her degenerative disc disease and other conditions made her more susceptible to repetitive strain injury, the cause of the problems was the repetitive long reaching and bending required at work and her injuries were “directly attributable” to the worker’s workstation.
The worker appealed her claim to the Ontario Workers’ Safety and Appeals Tribunal, which noted that the available medical opinions were in the worker’s favour. The doctor noted the worker hadn’t suffered from neck pain between 2008 until her most recent injury, and the physiatrist and physiotherapist agreed the pain was attributable to the bending and reaching the worker did as part of her job.
