presented by: Gary Massey
Linda Boly of Portland, OR, had been a nurse at the same hospital for 34 years with an almost perfect work record when she was abruptly fired in June of 2013 for poor job performance. Her employer, Legacy Good Samaritan Medical Center, claimed that her work had deteriorated and that’s why she was let go, but a jury disagreed and just last week awarded her $3 million in a wrongful termination lawsuit.
Boly was in fact written up three times prior to her termination, but it wasn’t for failing to meet the standard of care for her patients; it was for failing to meet the hospital’s productivity quotas. Instituted not long before Boly was let go, the quotas required nurses to see a certain number of patients a day, which sometimes meant that they had to cut short their care routines with one patient in order to rush off to the next one. Boly refused to follow the quotas, focusing instead on spending as much time with each patient as he or she needed. She took her concerns to management, saying that patient safety was sure to be compromised by nurses hurrying through their examinations. But Legacy’s response, according to Boly’s attorney Mick Seidl and to court records, was a group of managers starting an email chain about how to fire Boly because addressing her concerns could have cost the hospital the millions in revenue they were receiving from the additional medical procedures performed when nurses cycled through more patients in a day.
Boly, who said she was “in shock” at the verdict, is hopeful that it demonstrates to Legacy and to other hospitals and health care centers that quotas aren’t the important thing; patients are. “You just cannot sacrifice patient safety,” she said. Fortunately for Boly and for future patients, the jury agreed.
Wrongful termination lawsuits, and particularly whistleblower suits like this one, are hard to prove. Juries want to do the right thing, but it can be tricky to sort through all of the conflicting evidence and decide what that is. That makes an experienced lawyer invaluable in such cases to ensuring that justice is served.
Gary Massey, Jr., is a well-known courtroom advocate practicing law in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Gary is a native of Tennessee who began practicing law in 1998. He graduated from Cumberland School of Law where he was ranked in the top 3% of his class and was an editor of the Cumberland Law Review.
