Knee Injury: Court Turns Down Nurse’s Disability Lawsuit.
Legal Eagle Eye Newsletter for the Nursing Profession
May 16
Only one of the twenty-one hiring managers who looked at her applications or interviewed her had any knowledge of the nurse’s knee injury.
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT MARYLAND April 7, 2016A registered nurse remained off work a number of months for an on-the-job knee injury for which she received worker’s compensation. Those months coupled with her maternity leave put her over the limit the hospital allowed for time off the job in any one twelve-month period. She was separated but was allowed to reapply for vacant nursing positions. She applied for twenty-one available nursing positions and interviewed for some but was not selected for any of them. She sued for disability discrimination relative to her knee injury.
The US District Court for the District of Maryland dismissed her case. She was, in fact, not disabled. Before her job search began the nurse was cleared by a nurse practitioner at the hospital in connection with her worker’s compensation case to work without any restrictions.
However, illegal disability discrimination can still occur when a decision is made about an employee or applicant based on a disability the individual is falsely perceived to have. So the hospital got sworn affidavits from all but one of the twenty-one hiring managers stating that they had no knowledge of the nurse’s medical history, knee injury or worker’s compensation claim. The one manager who had worked with her had legitimate, nondiscriminatory reasons for not hiring her. She was not a team player and the nurse who was hired had prior experience on the unit as a CNA.
Grabenstein v. Hospital, 2016 WL 1389583 (D. Md., April 7, 2016).More from nursinglaw.com
http://www.nursinglaw.com/kneeinjury.htm
http://www.nursinglaw.com/backinjury.htm
http://www.nursinglaw.com/reasaccom.htm