Sometimes saner minds can right a wrong. But other times they can wrong a right too, incomprehensibly.Whose rights?Not the patients at a long-term care home in Kitchener, surely among the most fragile and needy of vulnerable people amongst us.What are they and their families to make of an arbitrator’s recent ruling that a registered nurse, indeed a team leader, who stole opioids from locked medical cabinets, who was once found by a colleague in a staff washroom with an ampoule of Dilaudid (five times stronger than morphine) clenched between her teeth, who substituted water for unused injectable narcotics that were to be destroyed, who falsified patient records to cover her thieving, must be rehired and financially compensated for “injury to dignity, feelings and self-respect”?It matters not that this individual — identified in documents only as D.S. — betrayed the trust of her employer and the patients under her care. It matters not that the employer insists it can’t meet the monitoring requirements specified for this particular individual by the College of Nurses of Ontario, arguing undue hardship to other staff. It matters not that she repeatedly failed to give residents the correct dosages of injections as documented. It matters not that she will be returned to the very environment that made it so easy to access the drugs she needed to satisfy her own addiction.Nor does it matter that the now 50-year-old mother of three wasn’t fired because of that addiction, which she never revealed to her employer over the two years during which she clandestinely scooped drugs at every opportunity. D.S. was terminated, rather, for cause — theft of drugs and gross misconduct relating to protocols.But no, that would make too much sense. The independent arbitrator ruled instead that the facility discriminated against the woman because her addiction caused her nefarious conduct. And addiction, classified as mental illness under th ...
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