California lawmakers are considering a bill that would expand the definition of what qualifies as a work injury for hospital workers, adding language to existing law that would include post-traumatic stress disorder and COVID-19.
S.B. 632, introduced Thursday, would apply to hospital employees providing “direct patient care in an acute care hospital” and would expand injuries to include “infectious diseases, cancer, musculoskeletal injuries, post-traumatic stress disorder, and respiratory diseases.”
The bill would include COVID-19 from SARS-CoV-2 and “its variants, among other conditions, in the definitions of infectious and respiratory diseases,” according to a draft.
The bill would also extend these rebuttable presumptions for specified time periods, in most cases three years, after the hospital employee’s termination of employment.
This article was first published in Business Insurance.
