One step the technologist skipped sat at the center of the ruling
A hospital technologist fired for sleeping on the midnight shift cannot recast that firing as disability discrimination, a federal appeals court ruled.
On July 20, 2026, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed summary judgment for West Penn Allegheny Health System, which operates Forbes Hospital. The message for HR teams is blunt: the duty to accommodate a disability starts only once an employee actually asks.
The worker ran CAT scans on the overnight shift. About a year in, she was reprimanded for calling out too often. The reprimand form even explained how to request a disability accommodation or medical leave. She did not.
Five months later, in July 2022, a coworker reported her for sleeping on duty, texting at work, and failing to stock rooms. Hospital policy banned sleeping on duty and warned it could cost employees their jobs. Her manager opened an investigation and met with her within two weeks to hear her side.
She denied sleeping but admitted she "might have shut [her] eyes" to ease dry eye tied to a change in her diabetes medication that was also making her tired. It was the first time she mentioned her diabetes, diagnosed before she was hired. She never asked for an accommodation or leave. The hospital fired her for misconduct.
She sued for disability discrimination, failure to accommodate, retaliation, and wrongful termination under the Americans with Disabilities Act and Pennsylvania's Human Relations Act, plus medical-leave interference under the Family and Medical Leave Act. All of it failed.
The reasoning is what HR should bookmark. An employer's duty to accommodate is "real, but it is not a license to speculate," the court wrote. "Employers cannot assume employees are disabled and need accommodations." Nothing in the record signaled that a medical condition was affecting her work, the court said, noting that "[d]ry eye and fatigue are not uncommon."
Timing hurt her too. She raised it "on the brink of being fired," the court said - too late to count as fair notice.
The decision also reassured employers on a practical point: neutral workplace rules can be enforced even when misconduct stems from a disability. She offered no evidence the stated reason was a pretext, and cited one other technologist who slept on duty but was never reported to HR.
In a pointed sidebar, the court ordered the worker's own lawyer to pay $14,636.50 for filing a motion full of misquotations - errors the judges said they "cannot tell if they were hallucinations by artificial intelligence."
