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Reasonable Accommodation In Nursing

Decent Essays

In the Pregnancy Accommodation Working Group (PAWG) table created by the Center for WorkLife Law (WLL), fatigue, for example, is an underlying pregnancy condition which may also be presented in people with conditions such as anemia, congestive heart failure, Lyme disease, and cancer. Therefore, the suggested reasonable accommodations an employer should provide include, light duty to avoid strenuous activity, flexible or reduced hours, and/or exemption from mandatory overtime (Zlatnik, n.d.). As the attorney for the nurse, these will be used in the arguments for wrongful termination of the nurse as a guide to support for pregnancy-related conditions that qualified the nurse to be given reasonable accommodations (Zlatnik, n.d.). The argument …show more content…

While the seriousness of a patient’s death should be investigated, the hospital failed to act promptly and investigate the supervisor’s or human resource (HR) department’s denial of reasonable accommodations or the previous errors made by the nurse. Therefore, the wrongful termination seems more likely to have been the case in this situation. The defense will show that rather than terminating her employment earlier the hospital waited until something catastrophic happened. The nurse took appropriate action discussing her health condition diagnosed by her physician that precludes her from working in the ER at full capacity with her supervisor. The nurse should have been given alternative assignments as appropriate or disability leave if no other alternative was available and should not have been terminated wrongfully after the incident (Pozgar, …show more content…

Any reasonable organization would be able to predict or expect that the ER nurses condition needed to be addressed by the hospital as it would ultimately lead to harmful result if they didn’t act upon the physician’s recommendation and the previous history of errors (Pozgar, 2012). The hospital failed to supervise or establish appropriate policies to provide reasonable accommodations for the pregnant ER nurse. While not directly at fault for the negligence by the nurse under the borrowed servant doctrine the hospital would be liable for the acts of their agents and in the least contributed to the negligence (Pozgar, 2012 and “Comparative and Contributory Negligence”,

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