CHICAGO — A Cook County judge won’t let Northwestern Memorial Hospital end a lawsuit from a nurse who claims she was wrongly fired for wearing her own personal protective equipment to guard against COVID-19 in the early days of the pandemic in Chicago.
On March 23, Lauri Mazurkiewicz filed a complaint in Cook County Circuit Court against Northwestern Memorial, alleging the hospital retaliated against her for wearing an N95 “particulate respirator” mask and for urging her colleagues to do the same. She said her March 19 termination followed a March 18 email she sent coworkers claiming the masks the hospital issued and mandated didn’t deliver sufficient coronavirus protection and indicating the N95 devices “are safer and more effective” than the hospital-provided facemasks.
Mazurkiewicz earlier agreed to voluntarily dismiss her claims against named defendants Bridget Wicherek and Jay Anderson, while also dropping two other claims against all defendants, an alleged violation of the Illinois Whistleblower Act and a vicarious liability allegation. Sheahan’s opinion formally ended those portions of Mazurkiewicz’s complaint.
In arguing for dismissal of the remaining count, Northwestern Memorial said Mazurkiewicz lacked standing because she wasn’t an employee, but a temporary worker. Sheahan rejected that argument, and also disagreed with the hospital’s position that Mazurkiewicz didn’t identify how the hospital violated a clearly mandated public policy.
“It goes without saying that Illinois has a clearly mandated public policy of stopping the spread of COVID-19 and protecting the health and safety of its citizens,” Sheahan wrote, “and that public policy is clearly implicated by the use of facemasks by health care workers.”
Northwestern Memorial also said the email Mazurkiewicz sent to colleagues was “little more than a personal gripe,” but Sheahan again disagreed, finding the missive wasn’t “sheerly a ‘private’ concern, but rather one that relates to the spread of COVID-19 within her hospital work environment and therefore one that has an ‘impact in the general welfare of Illinois citizens as a whole.’ ”
Mazurkiewicz is seeking unspecified damages, but which would exceed the $50,000 threshhold needed to bring the claim in Cook County Circuit Court's Law Division.
She is represented in the case by attorneys Jeffrey C. Grossich and Blake W. Horwitz, of the Blake Horwitz Law Firm, of Chicago.
The firm also filed a COVID-19 whistleblower suit in April on behalf of an Advocate South Suburban Hospital security guard who said he was fired March 10 a day after supervisors told him not to wear a facemask on duty. According to the firm, the hospital was already “treating several patients with COVID-19” and the fired guard is a caregiver for his mother, 65, who is recovering from two lung surgeries in the past year.