Opinion ID: 173268
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Alleged Staffing Crisis

Text: Rohrbough's communications with other Hospital employees regarding the alleged staffing crisis were made pursuant to her official duties. Her own admissions about why she was concerned about the alleged staffing crisis, as well as other undisputed facts about her job at the Hospital, demonstrate this speech was within the scope of her official duties as Transplant Coordinator in the Hospital's Heart Transplant Unit. Rohrbough admits she had the conversations about the staffing crisis because the staffing crisis affected her ability to do her job and provide appropriate patient care. Furthermore, she directed her speech toward other hospital employees such as Karin Keller, her day-to-day supervisor, Margaret Frueh, her manager, and Dr. Lindenfeld, the director of the Transplant Unit. Rohrbough correctly points out that a government employee's speech regarding staffing, although work-related, may fall outside the employee's official duties. See Brammer-Hoelter, 492 F.3d at 1204-05 (concluding that plaintiffs' speech regarding staffing levels was not made pursuant to their official duties). The speech protected by Brammer-Hoelter, however, occurred after hours in groups including ordinary citizens and parents and concerned aspects of school administration over which the plaintiffs had no supervisory responsibility and no duty to report. Id. at 1205. Unlike the plaintiffs in Brammer-Hoelter, however, Rohrbough spoke only to Hospital employees and only about matters within the scope of her duties as a nurse and Transplant Coordinator. See id. at 1204 (holding [n]early all of the communications at issue were unprotected because they fell within the scope of the plaintiffs' inherent duty as teachers to ensure they had adequate materials to educate their students). Thus, Rohrbough's complaints to her coworkers and supervisors about the Hospital's alleged staffing crisis were similarly made pursuant to her official duties under Garcetti/Pickering.