Opioid Dependence: Court Dismisses Nurse’s Disability Discrimination Case.
Legal Eagle Eye Newsletter for the Nursing Profession
January 2019
The Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) does not protect an individual who is currently engaging in the illegal use of drugs.
The ADA does protect an employee who is no longer using drugs illegally and is currently participating in or has successfully completed a supervised drug rehabilitation program. Unfortunately the ADA and the supporting regulations from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission do not define the exact length of clean and sober time that transforms an individual from a current user who has no legal protection into a former user who has been successfully rehabilitated and is legally protected in the workplace as a disabled person.
The hospital conceded for the sake of argument that the nurse’s depression was a legal disability. However, she was not a qualified individual with a disability. Her license restriction barring access to narcotics for six months after substance abuse treatment kept her out of the emergency department and med/surg units.
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT PENNSYLVANIA November 29, 2018The nurse’s license was already on probationary status for problems with substance abuse and she was subject to monitoring when she was hired for the hospital’s emergency department. The nurse manager who hired her knew about her history of addiction and her probationary license. The nurse did fine for two years and actually earned a promotion. Then she started taking oxycodone for back pain with a doctor’s prescription and soon relapsed into full-blown opioid addiction. Although a drug test proved positive for oxycodone and oxymorphone she was allowed to continue working because she did have a valid prescription.
Her attendance and behavior became erratic and she once disappeared entirely from the hospital. She was able to convince her supervisors that her problem was depression for which she was taking anti-depressants with unpredictable side effects. Finally it became unmistakable she was back in the grip of addiction. She took time off for inpatient addiction treatment.
Her employer required her to report herself to the State Board before she could return to work. Her self-report resulted in a restriction on her license against working in any nursing position that involved access to narcotics, which ruled out returning to her former position in the emergency department or taking a new assignment as a bedside nurse. The nurse herself turned down an office position because she did not want to work full time.
Because of the restriction on her license barring access to narcotics, the US District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania ruled the nurse was not a qualified individual with a disability relative to her former emergency department position or any bedside nursing position, even if she actually was a successfully rehabilitated substance abuser. Suarez v. Hospital, 2018 WL 6249711 (E.D. Penna., November 29, 2018).
More references from nursinglaw.com
http://www.nursinglaw.com/narcotics-nurse-disability-discrimination.htm
http://www.nursinglaw.com/narcotics-discrepancies-nurse.htm
http://www.nursinglaw.com/narcotics-diversion-defamation.htm
http://www.nursinglaw.com/diversion-narcotics.htm
http://www.nursinglaw.com/diversion-narcotics-nurse-disqualified.htm