DES MOINES, Iowa (Legal Newsline) – An Iowa emergency dispatcher traumatized by a mother’s screams is entitled to Workers’ Compensation, the state’s highest court has ruled.
The Iowa Supreme Court ruled June 3 in favor of Mandy Tripp, who was initially denied benefits for her post-traumatic stress disorder. The Supreme Court ruled emergency responders are not on a “different, higher bar” to be eligible for benefits for trauma-induced injuries.
Tripp worked for Scott County’s emergency dispatch system for 16 years. In 2018, she answered a 911 call from a woman screaming, “Help me, my baby is dead,” for more than two minutes.
Tripp heard from a responding police officer that the infant appeared to have been attacked with a claw hammer.
Tripp sought medical help in the months after loud noises triggered anxiety. She continued to hear the mother’s screams and was diagnosed with PTSD.
She wore special headphones to drown out loud noises and was prescribed medication. She sometimes wore special musicians’ earplugs under noise-canceling headphones, but she was unable to perform her job duties.
A Workers’ Comp commissioner and a district court judge found 911 dispatchers routinely take calls involving death and traumatic injury and thus, Tripp was not entitled to the benefits she sought.
“Focusing on the employee’s own job in determining an ‘unexpected strain,’ places workers routinely tasked with addressing traumatic incidents… in a disfavored position as compared with other workers,” the decision says.
“They would bear a burden to prove hyper-unexpected causes and hyper-unusual strains – some extraordinary species of traumatic event, above and beyond the perilous events that they regularly confront – to qualify for benefits that those in less hazardous professions receive by meeting a far lower bar.”
But nothing in previous court decisions or state law forces them to meet that threshold, the decision says.
“What’s more, making it harder for emergency responders to receive workers’ compensation for mental injuries would rest on a dubious assumption: that emergency responders have, or should have, some natural or acquired immunity to psychological injuries that might result from participating in traumatic human experiences,” the decision says.
“Few people, if any, could know if they possess such an immunity going in. And none would know for certain that they’d be able to maintain it. Tripp’s PTSD diagnosis, by all accounts, is a case in point: she was always able to deal with the trauma of the job for sixteen years until, one horrific day, she wasn’t.”