Legal News

A private hospital manager who had just given birth by caesarean has been awarded £18,000 compensation for being bombarded with work emails just after two days of her operation while she was still taking painkillers on the hospital bed.
Michelle Stone, general manager of Winfield Hospital in Gloucestershire, was sent a deluge of emails demanding her views on a complicated restructuring programme.
When she stopped replying to the emails she was branded as unsupportive and unprofessional and her hormones were blamed an employment tribunal heard.
The tribunal also heard that her boss went into a fit when she discovered that Mrs Stone wanted to avail her full maternity leave.
Ms Tania Terblanche who was the maternity stand by for Mrs Stone in her absence was continually bombarding her with insensitive work emails for four weeks.
When Mrs Stone stopped checking her email after her baby developed a serious illness, her temporary replacement made a formal complaint about her for being 'unsupportive.'
Mrs Stone was also branded 'unprofessional' for taking her full maternity leave entitlement, a decision which caused her boss to go 'ballistic.'
Employment judges awarded Mrs Stone, of Gloucestershire, the pay-out after finding she had been subject to sustained discrimination because of her pregnancy.
The tribunal in Somerset heard Mrs Stone had worked for Ramsay Health Care UK, a company with an annual turnover of £350 million, for 15 years when she became pregnant in 2009.
She gave birth by caesarean because of some medical complications which caused pain and mobility problems for Mrs Stone.
Handing Mrs Stone a compensation payment of £18,000, in a damning judgement the panel ruled that the discrimination faced by her was 'sustained over a long period of time, had affected the claimant at a time when she was particularly vulnerable, emotionally and having to face a damaging blame on her ability to have confidence in her position both as a mother and as a senior manager.
They also ordered that the company review their HR policy regarding maternity leave and provide staff training particularly taking in the legal obligations towards employees’ protected period.