The Difficulty Accommodating Health Care Workers
9 Saint Louis University Journal of Health Law & Policy 1 (2015)
19 Pages Posted: 15 Sep 2017
Date Written: May 1, 2015
Abstract
After the Americans with Disabilities Act was amended in 2008 to dramatically expand the definition of disability, courts have been more frequently grappling with the difficult issues of determining who is entitled to a reasonable accommodation under the Act and whether a particular accommodation is reasonable. This difficulty is exacerbated for health care workers. In this symposium paper, I argue that health care jobs are particularly difficult to accommodate because: (1) most health care jobs are physically rigorous; (2) most health care jobs involve long hours and/or shift work; and (3) the majority of jobs in the health care industry are safety-sensitive positions, with life and death often hanging in the balance. After identifying the most frequently requested accommodations by health care workers, I turn to exploring three over-arching issues that I have identified in prior work and analyze how these issues are often magnified in the health care context. These issues include: (1) employers' reluctance to provide modifications to the "structural norms" of the workplace (the policies regarding when and where work is performed); (2) "special treatment stigma" in the workplace—the reluctance of employers to provide accommodations that place burdens on other employees or that are seen as preferential treatment; and (3) "withdrawn accommodations"—the situation where employers take away accommodations previously provided. Although I do not provide any solutions to the difficulty accommodating health care workers, I hope this paper furthers future discussions regarding these difficult issues.
Keywords: Disability, ADA, Reasonable Accommodations, Employment, Discrimination, Health Care, Workers, Stigma, Special Treatment, ADA Amendments Act
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