Abstract
I argue that accommodating health care workers is difficult, perhaps more difficult than accommodating other workers, and I explain why. First, in Part II, I will describe the characteristics of health care jobs that make those jobs difficult for individuals with disabilities. These characteristics include: (1) most health care jobs are physically rigorous, often involving heavy lifting, pushing, and walking and standing for long periods of time; (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 or death often hanging in the balance.
In Part III, I discuss the three most common types of accommodations needed by employees with disabilities in the health care workforce and how employers and courts react to these accommodation requests. Finally, in Part IV, I turn to three over-arching issues I have identified in prior work and analyze how those issues manifest themselves (and are often magnified) in the health care context. Specifically, I will discuss: (1) employers’ reluctance to provide modifications to the “structural norms”9 of the workplace; (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to provide accommodations that place burdens on other employees or that are seen as preferential treatment; and (3) “withdrawn accommodations”—the situation where employers take away accommodations previously provided.
This abstract has been taken from the author's introduction.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2015
Publication Information
9 St. Louis Journal of Health Law & Policy 1-18 (2015)
Repository Citation
Porter, Nicole B., "The Difficulty Accommodating Health Care Workers" (2015). Faculty Publications. 2216.
https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/facpubs/2216
Comments
Written for the symposium The ADA at 25: Disability Rights and the Health Care Workforce (2015) at St. Louis University School of Law.