Opinion ID: 1282579
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: did the choking episode arise out of employment?

Text: An injury arising out of the employment must have at its source a risk not purely personal but one that is reasonably connected with the employment. There must be a causal nexus between the injury and the conditions of employment. [7] Courts have evolved three different analytical methods when probing for the presence of the requisite causal relationship. These are the so-called increased-risk, actual-risk and positional-risk tests. [8] Under the increased-risk test, a compensable injury is one caused by an increased risk to which the claimant, as distinguished from the general public, is subjected by his employment. It calls for proof showing that the nature of the work increases the risk of injury. [9] Under the actual-risk doctrine, recovery is permitted when the employer subjects the worker to the very risk that injures him. The court is not concerned that the risk may also be common to the public. [10] Under the positional-risk test, an injury arises out of employment if it would not have occurred but for the fact that the conditions and obligations of the employment placed the claimant in the position where he was injured. [11] This case does not call upon us to choose for analysis among the three available tests. The record utterly fails to disclose the presence of any employment-related risk factors. [12] The occurrence of an accidental injury from an on-the-job choking episode does not, by itself, disclose its connectivity to employment. The court relies on Bayless v. Sparkman Livestock Sales [13] and Lewis v. Western Electric Company, Inc . [14] Both of these cases are clearly distinguishable from the present. They stance as authority for the general rule that when a commercial traveler sustains an injury during the course of activities incidental to employment  i.e. traveling and procuring food and shelter  his injuries are compensable. In Bayless, a truck driver was asphyxiated while sleeping in a motel room, while in Lewis an out-of-state worker, temporarily assigned to Oklahoma, was murdered after working hours while either going to or returning from a restaurant. Bayless and Lewis apply the so-called positional risk  one whose origin lies in causes that are neither occupational or personal. Under the positional-risk assessment, an injury is compensable if the accident could be ascribed to a risk to which the employee would not have been exposed if he had not been on a mission for the employer. Although the claimant was doubtless in the course of his employment when he choked on a piece of meat at the restaurant, his injury was not shown to have any causal connection to his employment. There was here no exigency or some other condition that interfered with the claimant's leisurely and undisturbed consumption of his breakfast. At the time of the harmful event, there was absolutely nothing in the nature of claimant's work, or in the conditions under which it was required to be performed, that exposed his ingestion to a job-connected risk. Because the claimant utterly failed to isolate and identify some employment-connected risk element to which the harmful episode could be attributed, none of the three recognized tests, when applied to this case, could result in a finding that the requisite nexus was in fact present between the claimant's employment and his injury. In short, on the record here before the court, the claimant's choking episode cannot be ascribed to anything but a purely personal risk. While I would hold in this case that the injury is not compensable, it does not follow that all ingestion-related risks fall into a noncompensable category. There could be instances produced by the work environment in which choking-induced trauma would bear a causal relation to work activity. [15] No hard and fast rule can be laid down under any of the three extant tests. Each claim's compensability must be considered on its own facts. [16] Whether an injury does arise out of a claimant's employment presents an issue of fact When reviewing nonjurisdictional issues in a compensation claim this court must accept as binding all the trial tribunal's findings of fact which are supported by competent evidence. [17] There is here competent evidence for the trial judge's finding that the episode of choking  though it clearly occurred while the claimant was in travel status  did not arise out of his employment. A different finding would have been barren of any evidentiary support. I would vacate the Court of Appeals' opinion and affirm the trial tribunal's order denying compensation.