Diabetic Employee: Reasonable Accommodation?
Legal Eagle Eye Newsletter for the Nursing Profession
April 2016
A CNA worked in the behavioral health department of a county facility. She suffers from Type II diabetes and had told a nursing supervisor that she needs to take breaks to check her blood sugar and eat something when she becomes dizzy and lightheaded. She was nevertheless assigned to escort a behavioral health patient to an eye-doctor appointment. The elderly patient is wheelchair-bound and has a seizure disorder.
The CNA was suspended and then fired from her job after she left the patient alone and asleep in her wheelchair at a table in the cafeteria in the medical office plaza where she had had her eye appointment, while the CNA herself went to the counter to order something to eat.
The US District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin would not grant summary judgment to the county employer on the CNA’s disability discrimination case. It was possibly not a reasonable accommodation to assign the CNA to a task requiring constant contact with a vulnerable patient with no opportunity for a break.
Battle v. Milwaukee, 2016 WL 865290 (E.D. Wisc., March 2, 2016).More from nursinglaw.com
http://www.nursinglaw.com/diabetes.htm