Opinion
The sole issue in this certified appeal
The opinion of the Appellate Court sets forth the following undisputed facts and procedural history. “The plaintiff resided in an apartment building at 300 Tresser
“From 7 to 9 a.m. on February 18, 1998, the plaintiff performed health care services for one of Atrium’s clients, who happened to reside in the plaintiffs apartment building. At 9 a.m., she left 300 Tresser Boulevard and walked to a bus stop where she boarded a bus to travel to the home of one of the defendant’s clients on Knickerbocker Avenue in Stamford. The client on Knickerbocker Avenue was the first client of the day for whom the plaintiff was scheduled to provide the defendant’s services. She alighted from the bus on Hope Street and, as she crossed that street, was struck by a motor vehicle. As a result of the accident, the plaintiff sustained serious injuries to her arms and leg.
“The plaintiff [thereafter] filed a claim pursuant to the [act] . . . seeking benefits afforded by the act. She named the defendant as the respondent. [In response] [t]he defendant filed a form 43 denying the plaintiffs
“In his finding and award, the [workers’ compensation commissioner (commissioner)] adopted the parties’ stipulation of facts and also found, on the basis of the plaintiffs deposition testimony, that she rarely went to the defendant’s place of business in Norwalk, and that she received her assignments via telephone at her Tresser Boulevard home, where she also completed paperwork and received her paychecks. She filed her reports by mail. [Based on this testimonial evidence] [t]he commissioner concluded that the plaintiffs home was tantamount to a satellite office of the defendant.” Labadie v. Norwalk Rehabilitation Services, Inc., supra,
Additionally, the commissioner found that “[t]he plaintiff was required to use the public highways to attend to her duties for the defendant, which was for the defendant’s benefit. The commissioner also found that it was unclear whether the plaintiff was reimbursed for her travel from 300 Tresser Boulevard to the home of the defendant’s first client of the day. The commissioner concluded that the plaintiff was injured in the course of her employment and that she had sustained a compensable injury.
“The defendant [then] filed a motion to correct the commissioner’s finding, asking the commissioner to delete his finding that the plaintiffs home was tantamount to a satellite office and that it was unclear [whether] the defendant reimbursed the plaintiff for travel to the first appointment of the day. The defendant also asked the commissioner to dismiss the claim because the plaintiff failed to demonstrate that she had sustained a compensable injury. The commissioner denied the motion to correct. The defendant [thereafter] appealed to the [workers’ compensation review board
“In an opinion dated June 21, 2001, the board sustained the defendant’s appeal, concluding, among other things, that the commissioner had applied improperly the ‘coming and going rule’; see Lake v. Bridgeport,
“On remand, the commissioner addressed the three indicia of an established home workplace cited in the board’s decision . . . [and] found that regardless of whether the plaintiff performed duties for the defendant at her home, the amount of time she spent doing it was about fifteen minutes a month, which was not a substantial quantity of time. [Additionally] [t]he plaintiff kept no employment related equipment in her apartment, save a telephone. [Therefore] [t]he commissioner was unable to determine whether there were special circumstances of employment that made it necessary, rather than personally convenient, for the plaintiff to complete some of her duties in her apartment.
“As to the legal consequences of the plaintiffs having performed services for Atrium after leaving her apartment but prior to her leaving the apartment building, the commissioner found that the question concerned the parameters of his use of the term premises. He found that the plaintiff had not left the premises until she left the curb or lot line of 300 Tresser Boulevard.
“The commissioner also determined that the defendant did not reimburse the plaintiff for travel to and from her home, only for travel between the homes of its clients, which implied that the plaintiff was not in the course of her employment when she was traveling to her first appointment for the defendant. With regard to the ‘coming and going rule’ and the ‘benefit test,’ the commissioner concluded that because he had determined that the plaintiffs apartment was a satellite office, the rule and test did not apply. The defendant again filed a motion to correct, which the commissioner denied.
“The defendant once more appealed to the board, essentially claiming that the plaintiffs home was not a satellite office and that 300 Tresser Boulevard was not part of the premises of the satellite office, if one existed. The defendant further argued that the plaintiffs tending to the needs of the Atrium patient before departing for Knickerbocker Avenue was a deviation from her employment with the defendant. The board concluded, in an opinion dated June 3, 2003, that there was insufficient evidence to support the commissioner’s finding that the defendant maintained a satellite office in the plaintiffs home or that the plaintiff had begun her workday for the defendant at the time she was injured. Accordingly, the board reversed the finding and award of the commissioner.” (Citation omitted.) Labadie v. Norwalk Rehabilitation Services, Inc., supra,
The plaintiff thereafter appealed the decision of the board to the Appellate Court, claiming: “(1) that the board failed to abide by the applicable standard of review and (2) that the board improperly concluded that (a) at the time of her injury, she was not doing
On appeal, the defendant claims that the Appellate Court improperly concluded that the plaintiffs injury was compensable because it did not arise out of and occur in the course of her employment. Specifically, the defendant contends that compensation is barred by the coming and going rule because the injury occurred while the plaintiff was en route to her first patient of the day, and: (1) it does not fit within any of the recognized exceptions to the coming and going rule; and (2) it does not satisfy the benefits test. Additionally, the defendant claims that the judgment of the Appellate Court is contrary to public policy. In response, the plaintiff contends that the Appellate Court’s judgment was proper because travel was an integral part of her job and her injury falls within several of the exceptions to the coming and going rule that relate to employer mandated travel on public highways. We agree with the plaintiff.
I
WHETHER THE PLAINTIFF SATISFIES THE TWO PART STATUTORY TEST FOR THE AWARD OF WORKERS’ COMPENSATION BENEFITS
“It is an axiom of [workers’] compensation law that awards are determined by a two-part test. The [claimant] has the burden of proving that the injury claimed [1] arose out of the employment and [2] occurred in the course of the employment.” (Internal quotation marks omitted.) Kolomiets v. Syncor International Corp.,
“An injury is said to arise out of the employment when (a) it occurs in the course of the employment and (b) is the result of a risk involved in the employment or incident to it or to the conditions under which it is required to be performed.” Dombach v. Olkon Corp., supra,
The axiom commonly known as the “coming and going” rule fits into this rubric. “An injury sustained on a public highway while going to or from work is ordinarily not compensable. A principal reason for this
We now turn to the defendant’s first claim that the plaintiffs injury fails to satisfy the workers’ compensation two part test because: (1) the plaintiff is not a traveling employee within the meaning of the first exception to the coming and going rule; (2) the plaintiff does not satisfy the benefits test; and (3) the plaintiffs injury was not due to a unique risk of her employment.
A
Whether the Plaintiffs Injury Occurred in the Course of Her Employment
The crux of the present appeal, as identified by the defendant, is whether the plaintiffs injury meets the statutory requirement of having occurred in the course
1
The Traveling Employee Exception to the Coming and Going Rule
We begin with a discussion of the traveling employee exception. Injuries that occur during travel in such cases wherein travel is an integral part of the claimant’s employment occur during the “period of employment” and not merely during a preparatory phase, for which compensation is statutorily proscribed. The traveling employee exception “arise[s] in situations where the contract of employment itself involves, in its actual
Similarly, in the present case, in-home care is an essential and inescapable part of the health service that the plaintiff provided to her patients. She is no different than the serviceman in Dombach, who provided his engineering expertise at various work sites. Like the serviceman in Dombach, travel is part and parcel of her work.
We disagree with the defendant’s contention that the plaintiffs injury is not compensable because the defendant lacks control over her whereabouts as she travels to the home of her first patient of the day. This court has held compensable injuries arising from travel over which employers had little control.
2
The Benefits Test
The defendant also claims that the plaintiff fails to satisfy the “course of employment” requirement that
The purpose of this benefits test is “to make up for the fact that employees going to or coming from work [ordinarily] do not satisfy both of the first two course-of-employment requirements, place and period of employment.” (Internal quotation marks omitted.) Spatafore v. Yale University,
Moreover, our conclusion is consistent with the reasoning of several sister state courts that have addressed the status of home health care workers vis-á-vis the coming and going rule. In Olsten Kimberly Quality Care v. Pettey,
B
Whether the Plaintiffs Injury Arose Out of Her Employment
The defendant also claims that the plaintiff failed to satisfy the first prong of the two part statutory test, which requires the plaintiff to prove that her injury arose out of her employment, because, the defendant contends, the injury was not due to a unique risk of her employment as a home health care worker. We disagree.
“An injury which occurs in the course of the employment will ordinarily [also] arise out of the employment; but not necessarily so, for the injury might occur out of an act or omission for the exclusive benefit of the employee, or of another than the master, while the employee is engaged in the course of his employment. . . . Speaking generally, an injury arises out of an employment when it occurs in the course of the employment and as a proximate cause of it. [Therefore] [a]n
As the defendant suggests, conditions that arise out of employment are “peculiar to [it], and not such exposures as the ordinary person is subjected to. It is therefore immaterial where the exposure originates, whether from the employment, or outside of it.” Id., 310. We must be able “to trace [the] resultant personal injury to a proximate cause set in motion by the employment . . . .” Kolomiets v. Syncor International Corp., supra,
In Larke v. Hancock Mutual Life Ins. Co., supra,
Similarly, the plaintiff in the present case was injured while performing one of the essential functions of her employment, namely, bringing health care to patients’ homes. This essential function necessitated a greater exposure by the plaintiff to the hazards of public highway travel than that suffered by the average worker, and her injuiy, therefore, was a natural, foreseeable consequence of her employment as a home health care worker. Travel was as integral to the plaintiffs job as it was to the insurance representative in Larke v. Hancock Mutual Life Ins. Co., supra,
II
WHETHER THE JUDGMENT OF THE APPELLATE COURT IS CONTRARY TO PUBLIC POLICY
Addressing the possible public policy ramifications of our decision in the present appeal, the defendant claims that affirming the judgment of the Appellate Court will: (1) make Connecticut unattractive to business; (2) render the application of workers’ compensation laws unpredictable; and (3) encourage employers to require daily reporting by home health care workers to a central office location at the beginning and end of each workday’s home visits. We disagree.
It is important to recognize that our decision today is a very narrow one. It does not abrogate the coming and going rule; it simply concludes that home health care workers like the plaintiff fit into the existing exception for “traveling employees.” Despite the defendant’s concerns about the impact that our decision might have on employers’ costs of doing business, we are unper
We likewise disagree with the defendant’s claim that affirming the Appellate Court’s judgment will render the application of workers’ compensation laws unpredictable. Indeed, we believe that it will have the opposite effect. Our decision today does not contradict existing workers’ compensation law; it is an issue of first impression that is resolved within the framework of the fact based requirements and exceptions already in existence. By lending a degree of much needed clarification to the scope of the traveling employee exception, our decision herein will, if anything, aid predictability rather than work against it.
Finally, although the defendant has made much about the possibility of employers, in an effort to limit their exposure, hereafter requiring home health care workers to report to a central office location prior to and after seeing patients each workday, this is an unlikely prediction. In fact, it is pure speculation, as the defendant has failed to provide any empirical evidence whatsoever to support this claim. Assuming, as we do, that employers generally are motivated by the best interests of their businesses, if an employee’s commute to the home of her first patient of the day is shorter than her commute from a central office to that same location, it would not make good business sense for an employer to require that employee to check in first at the central office because the employer is exposing the business to a larger window of potential liability. Imposing such a requirement also likely would be costly for the busi
The judgment of the Appellate Court is affirmed.
In this opinion the other justices concurred.
Notes
This court granted the defendants’ petition for certification to appeal limited to the following issue: “Did the Appellate Court properly determine that a home health care worker, who was required by her employer to travel to the homes of its clients, sustained a compensable injury when struck by a motor vehicle en route to her first assignment of the day?” Labadie v. Norwalk Rehabilitation Services, Inc.,
“The CNA Insurance Company also is a defendant. Because the liability of CNA Insurance Company is contingent on the liability of Norwalk Rehabilitation Services, Inc., we refer in this opinion to Norwalk Rehabilitation Services, Inc., as the defendant.” Labadie v. Norwalk Rehabilitation Services, Inc., supra,
The Appellate Court explained that it “need not determine whether the plaintiffs apartment was a satellite office of the defendant or whether the plaintiffs performing some of her duties for Atrium was a substantial deviation from the duties she owed the defendant . . . [because] [t]hose issues are not relevant to our analysis.” Labadie v. Norwalk Rehabilitation Services, Inc., supra,
Put differently, the question is whether travel to the home of the plaintiffs first patient of the day is itself an integral part of her employment so as to place the injury within the period of her employment, or whether it is merely a preparatory commute to work, indistinguishable, as the defendant alleges, from the commute of other workers to their respective offices or workplaces.
The plaintiffs “commute” is distinguishable from that of most other workers because it is an inherent part of the service that she provides. She provides home health care, which is undoubtedly purchased by some patients because of the home component. By contrast, the nature of the service provided by a judge, for example, has nothing to do with travel, notwithstanding the fact that he or she might work out of different offices on different
In cases wherein the journey is part of the employee’s service, we note that compensability easily can be determined by the principle of deviation, which already commonly is used for evaluating the compensability of injuries arising from travel during the workday. In Kolomiets v. Syncor International Corp., supra,
In support of its contention that the plaintiffs injury is not compensable, the defendant, nevertheless, points out several notable exceptions to the coming and going rule for specific categories of traveling employees, such as: (1) emergency workers; see Lake v. Bridgeport, supra,
In light of this conclusion, we need not consider the plaintiffs alternate claim that she also fits within the exception to the coming and going rule for employees who are “injured while using the highway in doing something incidental to [their] regular employment, for the joint benefit of [themselves and their] employer, with the knowledge and approval of the employer.” Dombach v. Olkon Corp., supra,
The holding in McKieman has since been superseded by § 31-275 (1) (A) (i), which provides in relevant part: “For a police officer or firefighter, ‘in the course of his employment’ encompasses such individual’s departure from such individual’s place of abode to duty, such individual’s duty, and the return to such individual’s place of abode after duty . . .
Contrary to the defendant’s contentions, the Appellate Court did not conclude that the plaintiff was entitled to portal-to-portal coverage. Although the Appellate Court adopted the reasoning of Olsten Kimberly Quality Care v. Pettey, supra,
The amendment of Public Acts 1969, No. 289, is limited to police officers and firefighters and allows them to qualify for workers’ compensation benefits without having to satisfy the two part test and affording them more extensive, portal-to-portal coverage. It is important to note that the amendment was premised on a recognition of their unique job functions; see 13 S. Proc., Pt. 4, 1969 Sess., p. 1703, remarks of Senator Raymond C. Lyddy (“[ajctually, this [bill] includes now, Firemen and Policemen in the definition of for workman’s compensation purposes from their home to home again, because these people are on duty [twenty-four] hours”); and is not a legislative determination that they are the only traveling employees. Section 31-275 (1) (A) (i) does not, fherefore, alter the status of other workers, like deliverymen, whom this court since has determined to be traveling employees because cases so holding, of which the legislature is presumed to be aware, have not engendered a legislative response. See, e.g., Commission on Human Rights & Opportunities v. Sullivan Associates,
The defendant contends that Arkansas courts have since been reluctant to embrace the holding in Olsten Kimberly Quality Care, and cites as evidence, Daniels v. Arkansas Dept. of Human Services,