The WRC recommended that an employer pay a public health nurse €12,000 in compensation after finding she had not been afforded fair and due process. The recommendation was dated 4 September 2023. It also recommended treating her sick leave from May 2021 to January 2022 as special leave and restoring her previous sick pay entitlement.
The worker said the employer’s handling of complaints about her had serious professional and personal consequences and sought €50,000. The employer accepted that a grievance report found merit in her grievance but argued it could not change the national sick leave scheme and that no causal link had been established.
The officer found that the grievance report documented process failures and that the worker’s medical certificates linked her absence to work-related stress. The recommendations also included placing her retrospectively on the public health nurse salary scale from June 2021 and having the employer study lessons from the grievance report.