She caught a sliding patient and felt a pop - but her doctors told four different stories
A nurse’s workers’ comp claim fell apart when her own medical records told a different story.
The worker was an operating-room circulator at Washington Regional Medical Center in Arkansas - preparing rooms, moving patients, positioning them during surgery. On June 2, 2023, a patient began sliding from an operating table. She went underneath to brace them, pushed upward for roughly three to five minutes, and felt a pop in her left shoulder. Pain followed in both shoulders.
She reported it straight away and filed an injury report. Treatment started the same day.
The hospital did not seriously dispute the incident happened. What it disputed was what came next.
X-rays that day showed degenerative changes in both shoulders but nothing acute - no fracture, no sign of a fresh injury. A nurse practitioner diagnosed bilateral shoulder pain, restricted her duties, and sent her to physical therapy. When that did not help, a physician tried steroid injections. By August 2023, she was cleared for unrestricted work and went back to her physically demanding job for close to a year.
Then the paper trail got complicated.
At a February 2024 chiropractic visit, she reported problems going back roughly two years - well before the operating-room incident - and gave an injury date of January 1, 2021. A month later, a doctor recorded that her left-shoulder pain started after moving a dog across a car seat about two years earlier. At a follow-up, that same doctor’s notes pointed instead to a fall from a barstool while painting at home in early 2022.
A May 2024 MRI showed mild joint degeneration and fluid consistent with bursitis or tendonitis. When she first saw the surgeon in late May 2024, his notes described a history stretching back roughly two and a half years to the fall and the dog incidents. His notes mentioned that work activities aggravated her symptoms - but the specific June 2023 operating-room event did not appear.
The surgeon operated on her left shoulder in June 2024, finding tendon damage, joint arthropathy, and significant bursitis - though the rotator cuff was intact. Months later, in response to a specific inquiry from the worker’s lawyer in October 2024, he opined the June 2023 workplace incident was more than 50 percent responsible for the injury and the need for surgery.
An administrative law judge found in the worker’s favour in April 2025, awarding benefits. The full Arkansas Workers’ Compensation Commission reversed that decision in September 2025, with one commissioner dissenting. The Commission pointed to the unremarkable initial imaging, the return to full duties, the conflicting medical histories, and the way the surgeon’s causation opinion developed only after a pointed question from counsel. It found the worker not credible on the origin of her condition and gave minimal weight to the surgeon’s later opinion.
The worker appealed, arguing the Commission wrongly demanded a higher standard of proof and unfairly rejected her testimony. In a decision delivered October 28, 2026, the Arkansas Court of Appeals affirmed. The court found the Commission had not confused proving an injury exists with proving what caused it - it had simply concluded the worker did not establish the workplace incident caused the shoulder conditions treated a year later. The court also found the credibility call was based on identifiable inconsistencies in the medical record, not an arbitrary dismissal of her account.
For HR and safety teams handling comp claims in healthcare settings, the case shows that the medical record employees build across multiple providers effectively becomes the evidence file - and when those records point in different directions, the claim may not survive the scrutiny.
The Commission’s denial of benefits was affirmed on appeal. No further proceedings were indicated in the opinion.
