When staying employed meant burning her own vacation and sick days to cope with the pain
A nurse who could only keep working by spending down her own vacation and sick days has won a fight over whether that arrangement really counts as being able to do the job.
The decision came down on June 1, 2026, from the British Columbia Workers' Compensation Appeal Tribunal, with Vice Chair Renee Miller presiding. The worker, a nurse since 2007, was assessed with a 17.75 percent loss of function from a 2014 back injury. At issue was whether a supervisor role she could hold only by drawing on her yearly bank of 38 vacation and sick days truly restored her pre-injury earnings.
A career of starting over
The worker began nursing for the employer in 2007 and injured her low back in 2014. WorkSafeBC first denied the claim, but the tribunal overturned that decision in 2015 and her injuries were accepted as permanent. They included a low back strain and a permanent aggravation of degenerative disc disease in her lower spine, with chronic pain.
Returning to the floor was difficult, by her account. She found regular nursing shifts too heavy, tried a surgical floor, then moved into a supervisor role and later a community care team lead position that split her time between a desk and patient care. Even with those adjustments, she relied on vacation and sick days to rest.
Treatment gave her only temporary relief. After each rhizotomy on her lumbar spine she got a few months of partial relief, enough to work, before the pain returned. The procedures could be done only once every six months, and their results varied.
Counting the days off
The Board's vocational rehabilitation service concluded she could work as a licensed practical nurse supervisor, a role that let her change positions to ease her symptoms, and decided that job restored her pre-injury earnings. On Jan. 21, 2025, WorkSafeBC ruled she had no loss of earnings and would be paid disability benefits based on her loss of function instead.
By the tribunal's reading of the employer's payroll, she took about 250 hours, or 31 days, off in 2023. The employer acknowledged she used roughly 28 days of sick leave plus 20 vacation days between May 2023 and March 2024. By that March she had exhausted her leave and gone off work entirely.
Her own evidence described the pattern. After a couple of hours on shift she would leave early, unable to manage the pain, and a wait list meant another rhizotomy was months away. As the tribunal recorded her evidence, "So she is in a cycle of pain relief and then inability to work."
New role not a long-term solution
Vice Chair Renee Miller agreed with the worker's representative that the supervisor role was not a durable long-term answer and could not be treated as a suitable occupation. She noted the worker had managed a full three years of work between June 2017 and May 2020, but since then had not held more than 10 consecutive months of full-time employment, and only with growing use of sick and vacation time.
Miller also declined to go as far as the worker wanted. She found the evidence did not show the worker was completely unemployable, only that her capacity fluctuated and fell short of full-time hours. Still, she found, the worker "should not have to use her vacation days to manage her symptoms in order to maintain her employment."
Miller allowed the appeal and varied the review decision, sending the file back to the Board to identify a suitable occupation and work hours and to calculate any loss of earnings benefits. She made no order for expenses. The worker remains on long-term disability, which her insurer has treated as a full inability to work.
