Employment Question

[coldstream-1971]

Can anybody please advise me is the Medical condition SYNCOPE is covered by the DDA at work?

THANK YOU FOR ANY HELP

[Buenchico]

The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 doesn't provide a list of disabilities. Instead it simply says "a person has a disability for the purposes of this Act if he has a physical or mental impairment which has a substantial and long-term adverse effect on his ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities".

Since syncope affects over 40% of people during their lifetime, it's obvious that not everyone who experiences the condition will be regarded as 'disabled' for the purposes of the Act:
http://www.patient.co.uk/doctor/syncope
However there may well be a minority of people for whom the condition is far from transient and who find that it has "a substantial and long-term adverse effect on their ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities". For such people the provisions of the DDA will therefore apply.

[buildersmate]

To follow from that good answer, it is incumbent on the employer to therefore ensure they have appropriate policies, training, in place such that consideration is made in recruitment and working environments such they satisfy the Act. Disability is an analogue condition, varying in many steps from extremely mild at one end of the scale to extreme at the other. Unlike sex discrimination, which is digital (you can count the number of males and females in a set or pool of workers and make comparisons), there is no right answer to what an employer has to do.

Unfortunately, if employees and the employer can't agree, the ultimate arbiter are the courts, who adjudge whether the keys words in the legislation - 'serious' , 'long-term' and 'reasonableness' of employer's policies, actions have been breached.

You are going to have to say a lot more about the specific scenario to be able to comment further.

[buildersmate]

Oh dear.
Yet another poster who never bothers to feedback.
What a time waster.