Sometimes a situation that starts our clear can end up muddy. You are injured at work. Workers’ compensation is providing you benefits while you are out of work and going through medical treatment to recover. But then…another non-work incident happens which affects your work injury. The question arises: will workers’ compensation continue to cover your original injury, or has the new accident gotten in the way of your benefits?
In Illinois workers’ compensation, once it’s been determined that your injury was work-related, you are generally entitled to benefits to compensate you for that injury. And the Illinois courts are not so quick to take those benefits away from you, just because some other accident or event happened while you were trying to recover.
After all, sometimes a second injury is more likely to happen, because of the weakened condition you were left in from the work injury. There is some expectation that, even if you’re being very cautious, your first injury makes you more susceptible to experiencing some event which can either aggravate your old injury or cause a new injury.
Sometimes, though, the second incident that happens is not a consequence of your work injury at all. Some other random event happens, such as a car accident, that affects your recovery from your original injury. Even where the car accident was not caused by the work injury and the accident made your injury worse, workers’ compensation benefits have not been cut off.
In cases like the unrelated car accident, the important question is whether the chain has been broken that links the work accident to the most recent injury status. If there is an unrelated event in the chain while you’re recovering, it may shake the chain around a bit, but not necessarily break it. You have to look at whether the current injury would not have happened the way it did, if there hadn’t been the original work injury.
In the case of the unrelated car accident, even though the injured workers’ condition was made worse by the accident, had he not had the original injury, the car accident would not have had the same effect as it did. He hadn’t fully recovered from his work injury, so he was more susceptible to the complications to his health that happened after the car accident.
In other words, but for the fact that you had the first injury that was work-related, the second accident or event wouldn’t have caused the same harm to you that it did. The non-employment event won’t break the chain of the employment injury, as long as your employment is still a factor in causing your current injury.
You should, therefore, be able to continue to receive your workers’ compensation benefits for your work-related injury, even if you have had a subsequent injury—whether or not the second injury was caused by the first. If there is a connection between your current condition and your original employment injury, then the intervening incident shouldn’t cut off your benefits.
We are workers’ compensation attorneys that help people with Illinois work injuries anywhere in IL via our statewide network of attorneys. Contact us and we will answer your questions or find the right lawyer for your situation.
