OTA Dispatch Issue 3, 2021

16 Oregon Trucking Associations, Inc. Oregon Truck Dispatch WFH & WORKERS’ COMP By Jennifer King, Account Executive—Workers’ Compensation, WHA Insurance Adapting a New Setting & Mindset AS WE PASS month 18 of COVID-19 and the Delta variant spikes across Oregon, many employers are again considering returning certain job positions to Work- From-Home (WFH) either full-time or in a hybrid capacity. How does Workers’ Comp & WFH work together? WFH, telecommuters, remote staff are typically covered under workers’ compensation. To start the conversation, we get a quick study on this week’s vocabulary words to include course and scope and compensability. Course and scope is defined by the Oregon Workers’ Compensation system. It uses a “unitary” approach to determining compensability of a claim. Thus, a claim occurs “in course of employment” when the worker is performing activities associated or incidental to work responsibilities. A claim may also “arise out of employment,” meaning that the injury or disease must be attributable to the hazards of the employment. In Oregon, these two concepts are merged to form one of the tests for claim acceptance or denial. Compensability is the process by which a claims adjuster evaluates the worker’s claim and decides if the injury or disease is work-related and acceptable as a workers’ compensation claim. In short, if your employee has a work- related injury or illness during the course and scope of their employment, there is room for a claim to be compensable and workers’ compensation claim benefits to be activated, regardless of location. What are the most common WFH injuries? Quite often, the fact that your employees’ home environment does not have the same safety standards you have put in place at your workplace become your biggest challenge. For example, they are at greater risk of slipping on water spilled from a dog bowl, tripping over their computer bag, or falling down the stairs. The two most frequent categories of injuries that we are seeing with WFH are slips, trips, falls, and cumulative injuries (usually resulting from poor ergonomics). Slips, trips, and falls were the most common in the first several months but as time and the fatigue of working from kitchen tables has set in, cumulative/ ergonomic injuries are rising. Slips, trips, and falls are some of the most frequently reported accidents in