Whether an individual is eligible to receive workers' compensation benefits turns on the individual's employment status. Only employees are entitled to such benefits; individual contractors are not.
The workers' compensation system was designed to provide benefits to those employees who are injured in the course of employment. However, not all "employments" are considered to be within the contemplation of the system. By way of contrast, consider the factory worker who cuts his hand while working on an assembly line making car parts for the employer and the teenage boy who cuts his hand trimming hedges for his neighbor. Both the factory worker and the teenage boy were "employed" to perform a service for another. However, workers' compensation would only be applicable to the factory worker's injury. Other examples where resulting injuries would likely not qualify for workers' compensation, even though the individuals were paid for their services, include a housecleaner hired to perform a one-time spring cleaning on your home, a babysitter who cares for a young child on a weekend evening, and a mechanic friend who helps to fix a broken vehicle.
Generally, if an employee is required to travel as a part of his employment, he is covered by workers' compensation for the duration of the trip. There is a distinct exception to this rule when the employee markedly departs from the business trip to attend to a personal matter. In those jurisdictions following the majority rule for compensability above, an employee will usually be covered for an injury resulting from, for example, sleeping in a hotel or eating in a restaurant.
A medical professional who has been tapped by the Social Security Administration (SSA) to conduct a consultative examination of a child must include certain information in his report. The SSA mandates that the report containing an assessment of the child's history, examination, and any laboratory findings be consistent with the format for reporting results used for complete internal medicine examinations. The report must be thorough and complete in order to provide the SSA with the necessary information to determine the nature, duration, and severity of the child's impairment as well as the limitations that such impairment places on the child.
When an employer has actual knowledge of an employee's injury and its possible connection to the employee's work, most courts will excuse the employee's failure to timely give notice of the injury. Sometimes, however, such knowledge will be imputed to the employer. If a person associated with the employer in a managerial or representative role received knowledge of the injury, that knowledge will be charged to the employer. For example, consider the supervisor who witnessed the accident that caused the employee's injury. The employer itself will then be deemed to be aware of the employee's injury.
