Teacher Collapse: Work Injury Claim Denied – Dong-A Ilbo

“Lack of causal relationship between overwork, stress and death”

A court ruled that it was difficult to recognize a teacher who died from a cerebral hemorrhage while playing badminton during training for educational civil servants as a public servant accident due to a lack of causal relationship between overwork and stress.

According to the legal community on the 12th, the 13th Administrative Division of the Seoul Administrative Court (Chief Judge Jin Hyeon-seop) ruled that the plaintiff lost in the lawsuit filed by the spouse of the deceased teacher A against the Minister of Personnel Innovation to cancel the disapproval of bereaved family benefits.

Mr. A suddenly collapsed while exercising at a badminton court near his home and was taken to the hospital, but eventually died of cardiac arrest due to subarachnoid hemorrhage. At the time, Mr. A was undergoing training under the Educational Public Officials Act.

The bereaved family claimed that Mr. A had suffered mental stress throughout his teaching career and requested payment of bereaved benefits from the Ministry of Personnel Management.

In particular, he emphasized that he was extremely shocked by an incident where the school principal installed an illegal camera in a female teacher’s bathroom at a school where he worked in the past, and argued for a causal relationship between public service and the death.

However, the Ministry of Personnel Management disapproved of the bereaved benefits, saying, “The main cause of the illness was the onset and worsening of the disease due to constitutional predisposition or chronic disease factors rather than work-related overwork and stress factors.” Accordingly, the bereaved family filed a lawsuit.

The court ruled in favor of the Ministry of Personnel Management, saying that it was difficult to recognize the accident as a result of official duties because it did not appear that Mr. A had suffered from excessive work. The court ruled, “The deceased did not work any overtime in the six months before the onset of the illness in this case, and there was a significant period of time when he did not perform actual work due to winter vacation and training, etc., so it is difficult to say that he suffered from chronic heavy work around the time the illness occurred in this case.”

He went on to say, “There is no data to suggest that anything unusual occurred around the time of the onset of the illness, such as an unexpected and unpredictable work-related incident or a drastic change in the work environment,” and “There is no medical basis to support the fact that the illness in this case developed or worsened beyond the natural rate of progression due to the effects of overwork or stress.”

The court ruled, “Cranial aneurysm is closely related to risk factors such as high blood pressure, age, and vigorous exercise, and the deceased developed the disease in this case while playing badminton while suffering from an underlying condition of high blood pressure.” It was difficult to rule out the possibility that the cerebral aneurysm occurred due to factors unrelated to the stress of official work or that an existing cerebral aneurysm ruptured due to intense physical activity.”

[서울=뉴시스]