Pregnancy Discrimination: Nurse's Case Thrown Out
Legal Eagle Eye Newsletter for the Nursing Profession
Inadequate patient care is a legitimate, non-discriminatory reason for firing a nurse even with circumstantial evidence of discrimination, such as suspicious timing of disciplinary action right around the time an employee announces she is pregnant.
The hospital produced evidence the nurse was released because she was incompetent, in that she lacked the skills of a professional nurse which were essential to her work and posed a threat to patient care and safety.
However, in this case, the timing of the nurse’s disciplinary write-ups alone was not sufficient to validate her accusations of pregnancy discrimination, according to the court, given that the substandard patient care episodes were well documented and corroborated by many witnesses.
The nurse was not able to produce a witness, other than herself, to dispute the hospital’s list of documented incidents of sub-standard patient care.
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT, OKLAHOMA, 1995.The nurse involved in this case was recruited out of nursing school to work in a hospital's post-anesthesia care unit, having worked at the hospital in a volunteer capacity for some years before graduating from nursing school. Along with three other recruits in the PACU, two of whom had prior med/surg nursing experience, she began an intensive three-month orientation program in which she and the others were under the tutelage of a clinical instructor and always closely precepted by an experienced nurse while on duty.
Initially the nurse in question was seen as having a positive attitude, but was having trouble taking the initiative in patient care, was not asking questions and was not reporting going on and off the unit. A plan of corrective action was decided upon and discussed with her.
As time when on, however, there were numerous specific, documented incidents of sub-standard patient care, such as failure to administer IV drip and IV push medications properly, failure to call a code promptly for a patient in respiratory distress, and failures to assess patients accurately, all of which could have placed patients in serious jeopardy, if the situations had not been caught by preceptors or more experienced co-workers. After a series of disciplinary conferences, the hospital determined it was prudent and necessary to terminate the nurse's employment.
The nurse told her superiors of her pregnancy one month before she started being written up for serious discrepancies in patient care. After being terminated less than three months after the first serious incident, she filed discrimination charges with the EEOC. The Federal District Court in Oklahoma dismissed all discrimination charges filed over this nurse's termination, as there were adequate, documented, non-discriminatory reasons for her firing. O’Hara vs. Hospital, 917 F. Supp. 1523 (N.D. Okla., 1995).
More references from nursinglaw.com
http://www.nursinglaw.com/pregnancy-discrimination-medical-restrictions.htm
http://www.nursinglaw.com/pregdiscrim.htm
http://www.nursinglaw.com/pregnancy-discrimination-nursing-home.htm
http://www.nursinglaw.com/pregwork.htm