Jury awards $4.5 million to former Grinnell hospital worker in age discrimination suit

Grant Rodgers
The Des Moines Register

An Iowa jury has leveled a $4.5 million verdict against a community hospital and two top administrators accused of firing a longtime lab director who refused their orders to retire following his cancer diagnosis. 

Gavel

The award to Poweshiek County resident Gregory Hawkins came Monday afternoon following a 10-day trial against his former employer of almost four decades, the Grinnell Regional Medical Center, a private nonprofit hospital that serves residents across six central Iowa counties. Hawkins contended in an age discrimination and retaliation lawsuit that he was fired from the hospital in June 2015 while in remission from breast cancer, then replaced by a new lab director more than 10 years younger than him. 

Des Moines employment attorney Brooke Timmer, who represented the former lab director, said the jury award consisted of $220,009 in back pay to Hawkins, $2 million for past emotional distress and another $2.28 million for future emotional distress. In court documents, Timmer alleged that Hawkins was "targeted" for months before his firing with negative critiques of his work in retaliation for declining an order from the hospital's president and CEO, Todd Linden, and two other administrators to retire following his initial diagnosis in November 2013.  

"Just show a little compassion if you have an employee that’s dealing with something like this," Timmer said in an interview on Tuesday. "I think that was what stuck out to me the entire time. Here you have a guy who just truly wants to keep working.”

Denise Lamphier, communications director for the hospital, said Grinnell Regional Medical Center leaders are "very disappointed in the outcome of the case" and intend to file post-trial motions to overturn the verdict and an appeal. 

"We believe the evidence does not support the verdict or the extraordinary jury award," Lamphier said. "The case has always been about the patients who choose GRMC for their care and we stand by our staff and providers who work hard every day." 

The verdict comes as the Grinnell hospital has struggled financially in recent years, losing $2.1 million in 2015 alone.

The hospital announced in November that it was negotiating an agreement to be managed by the larger Des Moines-based Unity Point Health System and those talks are ongoing, Lamphier said. Linden, the CEO, has blamed the money problems partly on the fact that the hospital is too big to participate in a federal program that gives extra Medicare money to smaller hospitals.   

Linden, who was initially named as a defendant but was later removed, is known nationwide as a leader on rural healthcare issues and has testified before both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. He regularly speaks at industry conferences, according to his official biography. 

Hawkins, 63, was promoted to the lab director position in 1985 after spending a decade working at the hospital as a medical technologist, according to court records. The 49-bed hospital employs approximately 400 people and treats patients from Poweshiek, Jasper, Benton, Iowa, Mahaska and Tama counties. 

According to the lawsuit, Hawkins was diagnosed with breast cancer in November 2013 and began chemotherapy the following January after undergoing a mastectomy. The lab director took medical leave between December 2013 and the following March, when he returned to work on a part-time basis. 

In a June 2014 meeting Hawkins was told by Linden, Human Resources Director Debra Nowacheck and Vice President of Operations David Ness that the lab needed a full-time director and he needed to retire with 90 days, according to the lawsuit. However, Hawkins' oncologist expected him to make a full recovery by the end of the year and he wanted to resume full-time work then. 

The next month, in July 2014, the hospital suspended Hawkins from working at all until December, though he returned that October and was soon able to resume a full work week with his cancer in full remission. But Hawkins was fired the next June after administrators claimed that he failed to adequately manage the lab and its employees. 

Attorneys defending the hospital denied in court filings that the firing and subsequent hiring of a new director had anything to do with Hawkins' age or cancer diagnosis. The interim director that was hired in Hawkins' place after his firing was 65, attorneys Mary Funk and Stephanie Techau wrote in a brief outlining their defense.

But Timmer said she believes their claims were contradicted by lab employees who worked under Hawkins and supported him as a boss. Hawkins regularly received raises and positive performance evaluations from his bosses, she said. During his tenure, Hawkins led the lab through five successful accreditation inspections, according to court records.   

Hawkins cited his job at the hospital in a June 2014 email to his bosses as a significant force that helped him fight the cancer diagnosis — a main reason that he did not want to retire. 

"Honestly, I don't think I'd be doing as well as I am without having a job to keep my mind off the cancer," he wrote. 

Jurors found that the hospital violated Iowa laws barring retaliation, disability discrimination and age discrimination in the workplace. The lawsuit also named Nowacheck and Ness as individual defendants.