Opinion ID: 173268
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Occurrence Reports

Text: The undisputed facts also establish that Rohrbough's eleven Occurrence Reports were generated pursuant to her official duties. She wrote these reports at the behest of Susan West of the Hospital's Risk Management Unit. Furthermore, Hospital policies required that all employees, including Rohrbough, create Occurrence Reports to report unsafe conditions, errors, and near misses. Rohrbough's reporting about the conditions affecting her ability to fulfill her duties as Transplant Coordinator at the Hospital undoubtedly was an activity that stemmed from and [was of] the type ... that she was paid to do. Green, 472 F.3d at 801. Rohrbough nevertheless argues the communications in these reports were not within the scope of her official duties because drafting them was not something she was actually expected to do. Rohrbough relies on Garcetti 's focus on the duties an employee actually is expected to perform, 547 U.S. at 424-25, 126 S.Ct. 1951, and notes Brammer-Hoelter expressly held that employers may not rely upon generalized grievance policies to characterize official duties, 492 F.3d at 1204. These arguments misconceive the thrust of the analysis in Tenth Circuit case law. First, as noted above, employee speech not explicitly required as part of [an employee's] day-to-day job may nevertheless fall within the scope of that employee's official duties. Green, 472 F.3d at 800-01. Indeed, Brammer-Hoelter, the case upon which Rohrbough relies, held that speech could be considered within the scope of an employee's official duty even if the speech concerns an unusual aspect of an employee's job that is not part of his everyday functions. 492 F.3d at 1203. Brammer-Hoelter 's statement that a generalized grievance policy does not free an employer to retaliate against any grieving employee certainly does not also mean that every grievance necessarily falls outside the scope of that employee's official duties. 492 F.3d at 1204. Rather, Brammer-Hoelter specifically held that [n]early all of the plaintiffs' grievances were unprotected because they were made pursuant to their duties as teachers. Id. at 1204. Rohrbough's Occurrence Reports were similarly made pursuant to her duties as Transplant Coordinator. Her reports documented the eleven instances of substandard care she observed while fulfilling her job responsibilities. They detailed several cases in which Rohrbough felt the Heart Transplant Unit's patients had received inadequate care following medication changes, lab results, and other medical tests. Like the teachers' complaints about the school's curriculum and pedagogy in Brammer-Hoelter, these reports were all made pursuant to Rohrbough's official duties as Transplant Coordinator within the Hospital's Heart Transplant Unit. Her assertions that her immediate supervisors did not order her to write the reports and that other nurses did not write similar reports does not change the analysis.