San Francisco Employment Law Firm Blog

Having been regularly representing nurses, nursing assistants and medical assistants who work for major hospital in California, including such groups as Kaiser and Sutter Health, I see the same patter of work related injuries over and over. A nurse or an assistant is lifting a patient or moving a heavy object, causing an injury to his/her wrist or back, which often requires time of work, prolonged treatment and even a surgery. Some of those wrist/arm and back problems never go away and force the nurses to switch their jobs altogether.

As simple and as obvious as it might sound, strengthening the major groups of muscles in your back and arms/wrists by regularly working out, and just as importantly - having a brief stretching and warm up routine for the muscles and joints you use the most at work can take you a long way toward preventing those injuries. If, for instance, tennis players take their warm-up of their arms, legs and back so seriously in order to prevent injuries associated with sudden weight or impact, so should nurses and their staff do. While strengthening muscles and 5 - 10 minute warm-up before the shift will not guarantee an injury-free career, these simple steps will likely significantly reduce the frequency and gravity of the symptoms associated with pushing, pulling and lifting heavy objects.

Preventing or minimizing a risk of injury might require a degree of diligence and discipline from you, but it is surely a better option than dealing with the pain resulting from those injuries, and disability issues at workplace that may arise as a result.

ForensicNursing.org

Under CFRA (California Family Rights Act), an employer is generally required to grant an eligible employee's request to take up to a total of 12 workweeks in any 12-month period for family care and medical leave. CFRA or FMLA leave may be taken because of an employee's own serious health condition that makes the employee unable to perform the functions of the position of that employee. A "serious health condition" means "an illness, injury, impairment, or physical or mental condition" that involves either "inpatient care in a hospital, hospice, or residential health care facility" or "continuing treatment or continuing supervision by a health care provider." (Gov. Code, § 12945.2(c)(8).)

Thus, for instance, such a common illness as diabetes qualifies as a "serious health condition" within the meaning of CFRA, because the definition includes any illness that involves "continuing treatment or continuing supervision by a health care provider" or a chronic serious health condition which requires periodic visits for treatment to a healthcare provider, which continues over an extended period of time and which may cause episodic rather than a continuing period of incapacity, such as asthma, diabetes, and epilepsy.

In Dudley v. Dept. of Transportation, 90 Cal.App.4th 255 (2001), the court made it clear that it is unlawful to fire or otherwise retaliate (demote, suspend, discipline, etc..) against an employee for exercising his right to FMLA / CFRA leave. Further, the court held, the fact that an employee exhausted his leave rights before being terminated does not necessary change the fact that the termination was considered workplace retaliation and thus unlawful.