Protect Your Employees from Harassment and Abuse – or Pay the Price

“It takes leadership to improve safety.” (Jackie Stewart, Formula 1 legend)

One of your key duties as an employer is to create a working environment in which your employees are protected from harassment and abuse. As a recent High Court judgment graphically illustrates, dropping the ball will cost you dearly.

Meet the protagonists

The cast of characters in this unhappy tale features:

The employer: A private hospital in Bloemfontein, operated by a national healthcare group.

The employee: A Surgical Theatre Manager employed to oversee and manage the hospital’s operating theatres, manage the theatre staff and monitor patient care in the theatres.

The surgeon: Who conducted a private practice at the hospital and performed surgeries in its surgical theatres.


11 years of staggering abuse

To summarise a long saga of woe, the employee endured eleven years of abuse from the surgeon, the highlights (or, more accurately “the lowlights”) being:

• Eleven years (!) of verbal abuse in which the surgeon’s aggressive personality and temper tantrums saw him “hurling profanities, insults, blasphemous language and obscenities at [the theatre manager] while in the presence of other operating theatre staff and even members of the public”.
  
  
• The Court summarised the surgeon’s behaviour as “disgusting” – unsurprising given the employee’s evidence that the surgeon had once gone to the extent of flinging a patient’s colon at her, together with a volley of swear words.
  
  
• Only her sense of duty, and her pity for the patients (many of them cancer patients in dire need of urgent surgery), caused her to endure the constant abuse, defamatory remarks and insults for so long.
  
  
• She submitted numerous complaints to the hospital over the years, both on her own behalf and on behalf of other theatre staff (including several scrub nurses who refused to work with this surgeon), without any appropriate response. Indeed, she testified that the hospital told her that she and the other staff “were not allowed to lay any complaints against a medical doctor”, who was constantly touted as a “money spinner” for the hospital.
  
  
• It’s important to note here that, although the surgeon wasn’t a hospital employee under its direct control, the hospital had the right to revoke his “admitting privileges” at the hospital for any reason including “abusive behaviour or harassment”.

The theatre manager sued the hospital for failing to come to her assistance and endured almost eight years of litigation. She eventually accepted an award of R300,000 as damages for the humiliation, degradation, shock, anguish, fear and anxiety she suffered. This included “severe psychological and psychiatric trauma manifesting as post-traumatic stress syndrome and major depressive disorder for which she requires psychotherapy treatment”.

The Court confirmed her damages award of R300,000, together with a large portion of her costs including a portion on the punitive attorney and client scale.


The hospital (eventually) paid up. But what about the surgeon?

If you’re an employee unfortunate enough to fall victim to this sort of abuse you may wonder if you can sue your tormentor directly in addition to suing your employer. The answer is an emphatic yes.

The theatre manager in this matter did sue the surgeon for damages. And while he died before the matter was finalised, she obtained a confidential settlement from his deceased estate.


The bottom line

All of your employees deserve to work in a civilised environment. This can be achieved by having common sense policies in place – and enforcing them uniformly, regardless of the seniority of the staff member, or their value to your business.

No doubt the negative media coverage that accompanied this trial has rubbed a lot of salt into the hospital’s monetary wounds. Their humiliating court defeat was very public, and the reputational damage they suffered surely exceeded the R300,000 they ended up paying the victim.


Actions speak louder than words

Good idea then to learn from the hospital’s mistakes. On the plus side, it had in place detailed policies to underpin its zero-tolerance approach to harassment, together with clear grievance procedures. What went wrong, it seems, was its failure to implement them.

Don’t make the same mistake!