DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. (Legal Newsline) – What was once a $2.85 million verdict for the member of a heart-lung transplant surgery team at Florida Hospital is in jeopardy, as an appeals court has ordered a new trial under a more stringent liability standard.
The Fifth District ruled Oct. 30 that Orange County Judge Julie O’Kane gave the jury the wrong instructions when determining if Florida Hospital should have to pay up for firing Dr. Ahmad Z. Chaudhry after he threatened to tattle on what he thought was improper oversight of the Florida Hospital Transplant Institute.
Chaudhry had threatened to tell the United Network for Organ Sharing that the surgical team’s leader was endangering patients’ safety and that his concerns had been ignored.
Days later, Florida Hospital fired Chaudhry in advance of a visit from reps of UNOS. He was told to surrender his keys and access cards and his access to the computer network was revoked.
In fighting Chaudhry’s subsequent lawsuit, brought under a law that protects whistleblowers, Florida Hospital claimed Chaudhry was a lazy employee who participated in a low number of surgeries and was not liked by team members and other physicians.
The hospital also said he’d failed to develop relationships with other doctors that would lead to transplant patient referrals. Plus, he’d failed his board certification exams for the third time.
Regardless, a jury awarded Chaudhry $1.25 in lost past earnings, $1.5 million for loss of future earning capacity and $100,000 for intangible damages. The future earnings verdict was thrown out by Judge O’Kane because Chaudhry had scored a $500,000-a-year job after being fired.
On appeal, Florida Hospital fought Judge O’Kane’s instruction to the jury to consider whether Chaudhry’s threat to talk to UNOS reps was a motivating factor. She should have used recent U.S. Supreme Court precedent in her instruction, it said.
That precedent requires her to tell the jury that Florida Hospital can only be liable if Chaudhry wouldn’t have been fired but for his threat to blow the whistle to UNOS, the court ruled.
The new trial will include this hurdle for Chaudhry’s lawyers.
“While the Supreme Court in Nassar found that the ‘motivating factor’ test was appropriate for status-based employment discrimination, it held that the more stringent ‘but for’ test had to be applied in cases involving employer retaliation against employees who had engaged in protected activities,” Judge James Edwards wrote.