Madrid (EFE).- The Supreme Court considers that a fall in a hotel shower while on a business trip is not a work accident, but rather a common contingency.
The events occurred on June 7, 2018. An employee was on a business trip to Tarragona to speak at a seminar, but that day, when she was at the hotel, she slipped and fell in the shower when she was preparing to attend said seminar. meeting.
The woman was given medical leave due to a work accident for a week and the health care and subsidy costs were assumed by the insurer.
The mutual filed a claim against the worker, the company, the General Treasury of Social Security and the National Institute of Social Security, which had declared the event a work accident, although the Madrid Social Court number 33 rejected, as was later also done by the Superior Court of Justice.
This court argued that “we are dealing with an unforeseeable and fortuitous event that occurred in the context of a work activity that the worker was going to start immediately.”
And he added that “the stay in the hotel is an interruptive event or rest time (…) but if the worker had to go to the place where the seminar was held, the reason for which she fell in the shower was none other and exclusive than this last circumstance”.
After that, the mutual resorted to the Social Chamber of the Supreme Court, which now agrees with it by declaring that the temporary disability of the worker “has origin in common contingency”, for which reason it annuls the sentences handed down to date.
The Supreme Court says that “the fall while taking a shower in the hotel contracted by the company for logistical purposes could be considered to have occurred with ‘relevant occasion’ if there had been any factual circumstance that indicated so”, but “no data has been provided to the procedure any” that could support this situation.
He explains that there is no indication of an anomaly in the hotel facilities (slippery floor, lack of adequate lighting, etc.), nor is there any indication that the woman was affected by any circumstance (schedule change, little time available for rest, etc. .) that could explain his haste in cleaning operations, or any other psychophysical aspect (related to the mission) that influenced the fall.
Therefore, it specifies that “the injury suffered during a process of personal and intimate cleanliness, outside of working time, without greater labor connections than those exposed, is outside the contingencies that the law identifies as an accident at work.”