A Court of Appeal judge has taken the unusual step of criticising employers that are too quick to suspend employees accused of wrongdoing, after an NHS trust suspended and reported to the police two long-serving nurses who were accused of using inappropriate methods to restrain a violent patient.
In this case, the employment tribunal awarded an NHS worker, who was dismissed from his senior position in the NHS, close to £1m for race discrimination, despite the tribunal's refusal to increase the award for future loss of earnings on the basis of the worker's argument that he might have been promoted before he retired.
This employment tribunal has awarded a former NHS doctor one of the largest ever discrimination payouts after she was subjected to a sustained campaign of sex and race discrimination. The tribunal found the NHS trust and three senior managers, one of whom was the HR director, jointly and severally liable for compensation.
The NHS trust in this case unfairly treated two relatively minor criminal convictions as an adequate reason to dismiss a worker, in a case that is a cautionary tale for employers that treat a criminal conviction as an automatic reason for dismissal.
The Employment Appeal Tribunal has upheld the employment tribunal decision that a former NHS trust chief executive was automatically unfairly dismissed for making a protected disclosure.
The Employment Appeal Tribunal has held that a sleep-in payment was not an allowance for the purpose of the national minimum wage. Therefore it should not be excluded from the calculation of the hourly rate paid by the employer.
In Kulkarni v Milton Keynes Hospital NHS Trust and Secretary of State for Health [2009] IRLR 829 CA, the Court of Appeal held that NHS doctors subject to disciplinary proceedings are entitled to be represented at any disciplinary hearing by a qualified lawyer instructed by their medical protection organisation.
In Mid Staffordshire General Hospitals NHS Trust v Cambridge [2003] IRLR 566 EAT, the EAT held that an employer's failure to carry out an assessment to enable a decision to be reached as to what steps would be reasonable to prevent a disabled employee or prospective employee from being at a disadvantage amounts to a breach of the duty of reasonable adjustment under section 6 of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995.